D&D Character Thing - goblins!

SeveredHead

hello, i am trying to finish this painting, but im really bad with colors and ambient light and merging the character and the background effectively. shit is hard.

Iruka

Why is the upper right corner white like that? Are you following some sort of style convention, there?

SeveredHead

so it can fit into a book format, text would be on the right, and the rest just kind of blends into the page.

Iruka

With how much of her is protruding into the background, I feel like its throwing off the whole scenes contrast. I feel like with stuff like this:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/488007309605397024/

The toned paper is really helping things stay level. Maybe the page will be toned, but if that's the case would work with the tone as your background. The head being a part of the background in this example also helps, ad when you look at the focal point. you sill feel immersed in the image.

Angel_of_Bacon

I think an important thing to keep in mind that when it comes to contrasts- value contrasts, color contrast, saturation contrasts, edge contrasts- you want to save your powder for where it's going to have the most impact. Right now you've got a background with some pretty hard edges, very saturated colors- which is distracting from the focus of the piece, which is the figure. Also you have to be careful with the composition graphically- with the intense white of the ground, anything silhouetted against it is going to immediate have a very sharp value and edge contrast, driving the eye there.
So right now the area of most intense focus is that hand- very dark, defined shape against a pure white ground. But since this is probably not the most important thing you want to drive the viewer to look at first, it would make more sense to have a less dark hand against a more mid-tone background.
Quicky PO to demonstrate:


Here I've desaturated most of the background- yes, you may know a roof is red, but you don't want that big red triangle to be the thing a viewer latches onto. Made the background behind the legs a little lighter, bluer, using moonlight because that intense black before winds up losing the shape of the legs- and while losing edges into shadows is often an effective way to add mystery to a composition, I'm not sure if that's helpful here, with this more action-y pose. And while I've pushed a lot of stuff back in intensity, I also made a point of playing up the hard edges and most intense contrast where I thought it mattered most- the face and the knife, the things that get the story across most obviously. Where I've softened the transition of the background into the white in a lot of places, for the silhouette of the hood I made a point to leave that hard edge on the right to draw contrast, and on the left I played up the light from the lamp on the hood while darkening the background behind it, creating another area of sharp contrast.

Now, I don't have the story prompt for this at hand, and what I've done is just one of an infinity number of ways you could approach this composition- the point it less, 'here is what to do', so much as to get across that deliberately manipulating your contrasts is a tool you can use to get across whatever it is you want to get across more effectively.

Enc

Edit: Sorry, mis-clicked. I thought this was the q&a thread.

SeveredHead

hey thanks a lot for the crits, paint over helped a lot. i guess im calling this done, but still open to more skilled eyes than mine.
(she supposed to be this D&D race called yaun-ti they like half snake, half human, some more snake, some more human.)

SeveredHead

another dude, this dude is like a dark paladin that is really mean

SeveredHead

went back over this one, it really was looking poopy the more i looked at it. so less poop now.

SeveredHead

is there anything dumb that really stands out here? anatomy or some messed up angles? nah?

Doodmann

SeveredHead wrote: »

another dude, this dude is like a dark paladin that is really mean

I think his far shoulder is a little too big / squared up to the frame. It shouldn't be higher than is left shoulder unless he's raising the arm or something.

bowen

I think that's the shoulder neck guard thing making it look like that, also the awkward stance in which he's holding the weapons (it doesn't feel or look natural).

falconire

With the female character, the glow around her sword arm and around her shoulder is throwing me off. It might make sense in a thick fog, but you don't seem to be using heavy fog in this drawing.

SeveredHead

ice baboon man!!

Flay

Looking good. I think your shading is a bit overmodelled though, you should try to have a cleaner distinction between your light side and your dark side. There's also a little too much unnecessary detail in the anatomy. Here's a really quick paintover

Doodmann

I'm not sure on the use case, but if this was say...a magic card or something small like that wouldn't you want the overmodeling to make up for the loss of detail due to size?

Also, it looks like the jaw is mis-aligned. I get it sticking out, but it looks shifted to his left.

Flay

I would argue that because the details are going to get reduced they'll end up getting lost or creating noise that will make the image harder to read at a small size. But then again, I've never made a magic card

SeveredHead

yah i do have a thing where i make supposed to be fleshy things look too constructed, its like i want it to be defined and not mushy but yah theres a fine line there. also im gonna focus more on having a clear focal point instead of trying to focus everything!!

SeveredHead

how do you make a character look like he is in a place and not look retardeeeeeeddd

acadia

Yo this is dope. He feels much more 'in place' than a lot of your previous efforts. Consistent light source helps. Might want to give him some faint bounce lighting from the illuminated mist behind him.

SeveredHead

i kinda of copped out a bit on the background ahhahhhh... but theres defenetly an environment in there somewhere... i gotta force myself to study enviroments. but its combining my two hates, environments and studies.

acadia

Dunno why but I want that mist behind him to have some more deep color hue to it. Blue? Green?

gavindel

Panel backgrounds can work well, but in this case centering right on his chest deemphasizes the gesture. Since he is leaning to our left, you could push the panel that direction. That would follow the lean and give you more room for environmental details.

SeveredHead

dang son, yah that works, nice call. the left cropping also, good idea

barcs

really nice colours!

SeveredHead

@barcs thx sir

im trying out that greyscale process since its multiple dudes so i guess i can plan the lighting way easier by just going greyscale first? the coloring will be interesting, never seems to look quite right when you wash over color over brush strokes it didnt make, if you get my meaning. but well try it anways.... greyscale part is fun though, way simpler trying to render without also blending tones and all that crap


i actually rendered this first one out normally.. so yay for wasting time