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Kendeathwalker
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Second, and this may not be what you're going for at all, but I figured I'd give it a go based on your last few comments w/cake in your last thread about the lack of 'draw accurately training', so I'd figure I'd attack it more from that angle than trying to necessarily get inside your head about style.
You might get a stronger read on your figures by being more discrete with your lighting. Don't be afraid of cast shadows or going dark if you need to- though admittedly doing so effectively may be easier in gouache or some other medium than in water color.
Also, I get what you're going for with the splotches at the top and bottom and that's cool, but you may want to work on making them look a bit less systematic in application- 'top 1/4: grey splotches, bottom 1/4: black splotches'. I think you're going for a sort of rough, expressionistic fade out, but could read as the guy just jumped into a big vat of tar.
Oddly, the outlines on all your figures require no changes to be brought up to a point of moderate realisticalness, they just lack an internal sense of form. Now, like I was kind of getting at in your last thread, if you want to go stylized, those outlines should be stylized with it, to enhance composition for a flat read: without internal form the outlines just seem wobbly and uncertain, even if they are 'correct' in the sense that that's how they would be in real life.
With a flatter style you need to make your shape and line design work a bit harder than with realism (ideally a realistic style still has good shape design, of course, but it's not necessarily going be the lynch pin that holds the picture together)- you need design curves vs straights, wobbly versus confident, bold versus wispy, etc. at a conscious level. Currently there's more of a single line/shape quality across the picture, rather than what feels like a designed linework. Try pushing it- push your man-made part machine-tooled sharp, push your organic parts to feel more loose and less controlled. Push the sharp edge of an elbow to be sharper, so it contrasts with the slack line of the fabric surrounding it. Take a look at the foreground guy's arm on the left (his right)- the whole arm boils down to two near-parallel lines, which may be realistic but not necessarily going to read well when the foreshortening gets subdued by a flat color treatment- therefore, it may be worth considering bending the arm in at the elbow a bit, bringing the gun up a bit, so the pose is clearer when read as pure shape...and now I'm rambling on about things that I didn't do anything about on the paintover and I didn't want to get dragged into style anyway so now I'm going shut up.
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the dog
is awesome
Good work !
That being said, there are a few minor issues that I think need addressing (despite you having said that you don't think you'll rework them)
I think the dog still blends in too much with the background, which is especially an issue when you consider how vague the BG is. The binary trail is an excellent use of shape and value to break up the space, but I'm wondering whether its enough to get the job done? Don't get me wrong, I love how sparse and vague the BG is, but I'm wondering if it couldn't be defined just a liiiiiittle bit more.
The back of the dogs head, and neck are also so sparse and non-descript(?) that they blend with the BG too much. The only thing I'd like to point out is that the dog's right front leg is positioned too far down and forward. It makes it look a little too awkward to me. If you do rework the image, try moving the leg up, and to the left.
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The fact that the monitor is the only thing parallel to the picture plane, and the fact that it's display is so much more high contrast compared to the rest of the image makes it stick out like a sore thumb.
However, the other one with the armymen-keyboard and tank-mouse was done really well. great idea and execution on that.
Even though you want that area to be the center of attention, you still want the work to pull the viewer's eye through the rest of the work.
Off the top of my head, a few things that could've helped with eye movement:
Stuff like either having the monitor at an angle or having other, weaker elements of the picture also align with the x and y axis would help. Also, keeping some texture in the keyhole even though it is lighter than the rest of the monitor and having at least one area (possibly near the opposite corner, or some strong hits of highlight on the curvy keys) where the light reflecting from the monitor is almost as strong as the light in the monitor.
what's your normal process on these.
What printer do you use, I was surprised by Canon i9900 could handle both the girth of canvas paper and watercolor paper, and the fragility of thin newsprint.
That whale pic looks rad. You totally achieved the pose in front of the whale look. The handle to the umbrella is distractingly stark, but if it were lightened, the hat would be too dark. Then again, that could be from the polarizing effects of it being viewed on a monitor instead of in person.
good job.
The Canvas pad stuff is rad, it's sheets of thin canvas primed and ready to paint on. It's great if you fuck around with oil paint, overkill for anything else, and since it's primed, watercolors kind of bead up on it, so not too great for that. There's also cheaper types that are paper with a faux-canvas surface
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