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HugmasterGeneral
Poopmaster GeneralYobuttRegistered User regular
Poopmaster GeneralYobuttRegistered User regular
It's hard throwing yourself to the wolves when you're not as good as you could be, but would still like critique.
I'd like to hear opinions on my work, not only on this particular piece, but what I could do as an artist to expand my understanding of the human form. I'm humbled by people who can sit down and, in an hour, throw out some amazing page of actiony comics, while I struggle to crank out the lines of this poor piece in about the same time.
I often draw from life, although I don't have the priviledge of any sort of art school, I do study human form in photos, whose effectiveness as a teaching aide is greatly controversial.
A little about the piece: Seth is a character who has been in my mind a long time until he finally made it into my first completed book. (He did not yet have skin -- not until the next story, in which he has donned the likeness of his creator.) I wanted to make something that showed not only the perfection of his humanity, but the elegant craftsmanship of his human-like musculature and structure beneath. If it matters, his muscles are made of a fictional metal that contracts and expands with electric current, much like human muscle fiber.
Anyhoo, I wanted to put it on a backdrop, but I didn't have a whole lot of time, so I gave him an admittedly rudimentary shadow. Despite any and all flaws, I hope it is still a desirable work.
I'd like to hear opinions on my work, not only on this particular piece, but what I could do as an artist to expand my understanding of the human form. I'm humbled by people who can sit down and, in an hour, throw out some amazing page of actiony comics, while I struggle to crank out the lines of this poor piece in about the same time.
I often draw from life, although I don't have the priviledge of any sort of art school, I do study human form in photos, whose effectiveness as a teaching aide is greatly controversial.
A little about the piece: Seth is a character who has been in my mind a long time until he finally made it into my first completed book. (He did not yet have skin -- not until the next story, in which he has donned the likeness of his creator.) I wanted to make something that showed not only the perfection of his humanity, but the elegant craftsmanship of his human-like musculature and structure beneath. If it matters, his muscles are made of a fictional metal that contracts and expands with electric current, much like human muscle fiber.
Anyhoo, I wanted to put it on a backdrop, but I didn't have a whole lot of time, so I gave him an admittedly rudimentary shadow. Despite any and all flaws, I hope it is still a desirable work.
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And if you look at the calf on the same leg, its huge, but if you look at the ankle going into the leg of his pants, the calf is tiny. I can't explain why, because I don't know anatomy well enough myself, but it looks "off" to me.
Sorry I can't be more descriptive, but thats my two cents. I think its a great picture overall, and I particularly like the hair. It looks almost like my hair in real life.
Some main problems
-Lighting
Where's your lightsource? I see weak indications of highlights and shadows on some edges but overall the entire figure seems to be lit uniformly. Think more about where your light is coming from and how it will fall on your subject. Light is almost like water in some respects, and the way it "flows" over an object can offer lots of information which will enhance the perceived form, and make it more convincing overall. It sounds stupid but I'm dead serious, study light. Start with an Egg on a smooth surface with a single light source, and move up to more complex objects. Eventually you will learn the rules well enough that you can apply convincing lighting to imagined objects.
Sidenote: The metal beneath the skin doesn't read as metal at *all*. This too will come with knowledge of light, as you'll begin to appreciate how different materials react to light in vastly different ways.
-Anatomy
A constant battle for every artist. Nothing specific I can say about this picture will help you in this regard, frankly, as learning anatomy is something you must largely undertake on your own until there's more right than there is wrong in your work. All over the body there are ham-fisted guesses at muscular structure that simply are off. You're doing a lot of 'symbolizing' in places as well, particularly noticeable on the face. Proportions are off, the gesture is stiff and unnatural, even for a cyborg. I'm glad you like his hair, it's important to feel proud for minor victories on the road to greatness, but it's more important to realize that as an artist nearly everything you do is wrong, and you work in the hopes of getting less wrong. If you ever settle for complacency, then that is when you stop improving. The hair is too flat and as such looks more like a piece of construction paper than a healthy mane. This happens when you render the entire head of hair with a uniform texture and brightness, it simply ends up looking fake.
Random Tidbits-
The clothing is all made-up. His shirt and pants defy the laws of physics and cling to his body in a very imagined way, which is to say you made an educated guess about how the cloth would drape over his body without having the education. Cloth can be tricky, but once you study it enough you begin to understand how it stretches and bunches up in different ways under different conditions and on different objects.
Fancy Photoshoops. It's not very noticeable but I definitely see some ares where it looks like you took a soft brush and went over the contour in an apparent effort to create that over-used "over-brightening" effect as if he was standing in front of a spotlight or something. Don't do this, it looks cheap and unless you know *exactly* what you're doing it won't add anything to your picture.
Color is another snarling, tentacled beast entirely that I'm not going to get into right now. I will say that in my opinion it would behoove you to stick with pencils and other grayscale mediums until you have a stronger command over lighting.
*THE MOST IMPORTANT TIP IN THIS POST*
I know it probably feels like I just gave you a sucker-punch after all that, but it's very important to take all of this in stride and know that learning this stuff just takes time, and if you don't give up you CAN get there.
For example, your character Seth here has clothing folds but they don't apply to the rules of kinetic forces. There's always going to be a stretch and contract in certain areas to balance one another out, and the more extreme the pull of the anchor point, the longer and thinner the fold will be (the reverse is true regarding contrasting folds). Take a look at his right leg; the groves of the lower leg and kneecap are showing through, which simply isn't possible in the real world. Since the kneecap itself is an achor point for the folds, and since the knee is pointing upwards, gravity is going to take over and create long, lean, graceful stretch folds. To balance that out, there'll be a clump of condensed folds behind the back of the leg, but i'm sure you alrealdy saw that coming.
Hope that didn't sound too harsh.
not bad in general. seems like its things you'll get down by practice.
I don't want to defend my work overly much, as I know that's a no-no. I did have a definite light source, which was upper right on the same plane on his torso, I just couldn't seem to get the colors contrasted enough to reflect that (no pun intended). The light bleeding was meant to enhance that, especially on the metallic parts.
I'm not sure what's wrong with the face. The hair, sure, but I thought his face was pretty good, despite a bit of dullness from lack of shading.
All that aside, I know it's a terrible piece, but it's strongly indicitive of my current body of work. I appreciate the words of encouragement. It feels like I'm lacking a piece of the puzzle that is my slowness to improve. I'll show you what I mean.
(Yeah, I know. The light bleeding again. I dunno, I just really want to use it on anything metal.)
These are both pieces I finished probably a year ago. As you can see, I haven't changed or improved in that time. I've studied the Loomis books, the cloth folds books, ones about lighting and shadow... I don't know. It feels like I'm fighting an end boss in a Legend of Zelda game, but I'm missing the one piece of knowledge that would make the battle way easier. (Maybe I should use the ion cannon at the weak point for massive damage...)
Anyway, critiques are welcome on the other two, but what I'd really like is to figure out why I haven't progressed as an artist in at least a year (or more!), and any tips down that road would be entirely helpful.
Thanks guys.
The light sorce problem is that the way your talkling light is "Its coming from the right? then start highlights at, or close the right line and gradient back." and its not describing anything, so its not telling us where it is. listen to scos on that.
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.
It’s hard to wrap your head around until you’ve done it but I can tell you the level of improvement I went through in my two years of drawing classes (before my funds dried up) was substantial and all the kooky gibberish my art teachers were saying started to make sense. The teachers gave lots of good advice (much of it is echoed here) but more than anything they made us draw; over and over. We drew nothing but boxes for 3 months to give us a solid understanding of shape; one day they had us bring in a simple object from home and we had to produce 100 drawings of it by the end of class, we drew our homes, our rooms, hallways, branches & acorns, hundreds of figure drawings and so on. I’m still nowhere near the level I would need to be to actually call myself a skilled artist but I do understand (kindof) where that level is; it’s a long road with no shortcuts.
*Edit- What I'm trying to say in my long winded sciolistic mutterings is that whether or not you went to art school isn't nearly as important as the amount of time you dedicate to drawing.
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hagar? i thought the same thing.
And no, it's not the guy from Final Fight. I don't even know what Hagar looks like. :P
Edit::
Sirnos:
Haggar: (I didn't draw the ones below, of course.)
Hahaha. I guess he does bear a slight similarity. But dang I wish I could draw like that. (The first one, of course. The second is obviously a 3D render)
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