# Could use some advice.



## Pogiforce (Feb 5, 2012)

I'm a little embarrassed about this but my usual sources of critique are proving less than useful, and begging for comments in journals doesn't work. My art is kinda fetishy even though I'd rather it wasn't, and something about it just seems... off. I dunno what it is. Here's some of my more recent work.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7212709
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7178389
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7003635/

I feel like I'm overlooking something that could make this better, but can't put my finger on it. Any advice would be useful. Just please be nice, I don't respond well to overly harsh criticism. ;.;


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 5, 2012)

You really need work on your foundations. While you got ideas going - the epic clash it's nice to see there's some kind of story going on vs posing...there's quite a few anatomy errors that are killing your work as well as you got the "burn/dodge rape" going on  and "Slap an obvious filter on it" vs actually knowing how to color.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=154134

The crocodile one looks like you got reference for most of it, and that's fine because reference is good - but there are still quite a few flaws. The hand on her hip is a definite issue, doesn't look like the arm/elbow is properly connected when resting on that hip either. The feet and ankles look rushed - as they don't seem to have ankles that would support those feet. There are definite problems with the breasts as well, they're not sloping naturally and the breasts look tacked on. Even though being muscular tends to cause less fatty breast tissue, don't make the breasts look like bad boob jobs... As the coloring goes...really need to work on it. I'm not sure what's going on with the background but the character's got an obvious filter that making her look like a paper doll and flattening her. In addition, as I said before please avoid the burn/dodge tool. If you're not using please avoid coloring like that because it does look like you're abusing it. You need to learn about how colors work in shadow and light. http://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Guide-Realist-Painter/dp/0740797719 is a great book on it. But doing some foundational exercises like still life drawings will help you understand color too, but it takes time.

The whale girl suffers from the burn and dodge rape too. You're trying to cast a water spell, but that doesn't even look like water. Also her pose isn't giving me this really good indication of such a spell either. She looks kind of knock-kneed and like she's holding her stomach from food poisoning in a workout outfit vs... "I'm casting a spell!" The line quality of the work isn't good, there are scratchy lines around her hand that make them look malformed. I know these hands are not supposed to look human and more marine - but you gotta pay attention to where you start and and end a line and how it affects how that line looks. 

On the last one, it's nice to see a fantasy element telling a story, however - there's a lot more planning you need to do when you work out composition. I've talked to others about tangents http://comicsworthreading.com/2011/10/27/art-lesson-avoiding-tangents/ and http://emptyeasel.com/2008/11/18/av...l-blunders-every-artist-should-watch-out-for/ The composition looks rather cramped because you're trying to fit all these elements in but didn't plan well on how they look design/composition wise. The furry character on the ground has a broken leg. You have the knees facting outward but the foot facing in the opposite direction. OUCH. Your knees are guidelines to where you should place the foot, and rarely with the weight distribution will you find your feet doing the opposite of what the knee is doing. The gracilis muscle just fused itself to the other leg instead of the hip it's supposed to be on. Everything about this piece doesn't look like you decided to plan on lighting to set the mood but you went Filter Crazy. The trees...I'm sorry, look awful. The grass effect also looks pretty obvious. It looks like a bad rubber stamp. It's like a forest of repeating green boogers. The mountain has really sharp lines and doesn't look like a mountain, nor does it look like it's receding into the background. The water and perspective of the scene is off. Where are your vanishing points? Where is the horizon line? Your rocks don't look like rocks either. The textures also look slapped on. I'm also curious about the wraith kind of character floating. Why is it so cut off, why is the coloring of the robes completely opposite of the linework you have describing the direction of the robes? It's like you didn't even try with looking at folds. Here's some guidelines, but look at some reference too http://www.mightyartdemos.com/mightyartdemos-bradley.html


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## Pogiforce (Feb 5, 2012)

I didn't use Burn or Dodge on any of these pictures... and the only filter I used was a lense flaire, on a picture I didn't link to here... The background on the gator was me not knowing how to do a proper swamp background, and not willing to take the months I'm sure it would take me to learn it to post it.

I shade by using a base color, and from there I color select a color that's a step darker, and another that's darker than that. One for shadows and one for deep shadows respectively. inversely I do the same thing for highlights, but a step brighter instead of a step darker. sometimes I use a dark blue with my shadows, and sometimes I use a bright yellow or white with the highlights, if I feel they're warranted.

that's not a whale, that's a dolphin. it's someone's OC. I didn't pick the outfit.

I don't understand what you mean by the linework for the death lord's robes being opposite the the coloring. He's a deathlord, his robes are living shadows, it's the reason why there aren't a lot of highlights and why almost as soon as they leave the main body they lack form. if you're talking about how his sleeves are moving in a different direction than gravity, I was trying to imply motion. It's the same reason why the one on the ground his billowing hair and clothing. 


The thing about Tangents is interesting to know, and I think will be easier to be aware of now that I know it's an issue in illustration. and now it also looks like I'm going to have to look up what the Gracilis muscle is.

I'm going to be honest, this is a lot harsher a critique than I was hoping for, but I had a feeling I was asking for it posting here in the first place, so I guess I can't really get upset. I suppose this just means my lack of self esteem in my art work is well warranted.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 5, 2012)

Pogiforce said:


> I shade by using a base color, and from there I color select a color that's a step darker, and another that's darker than that. One for shadows and one for deep shadows respectively. inversely I do the same thing for highlights, but a step brighter instead of a step darker. sometimes I use a dark blue with my shadows, and sometimes I use a bright yellow or white with the highlights, if I feel they're warranted.
> 
> that's not a whale, that's a dolphin. it's someone's OC. I didn't pick the outfit.
> 
> ...



Ok on how you pick color is exactly the problem why it looks like Burn Dodge rape. People think that if you're going to pick a shadow, you go down the scale and add a shade to it, ie...more black. But it doesn't work that way. There's spots where you need to account for saturation. You're not going to have just the same color green, and add black, there may be more green (saturation) into the shadow. In fact, most shadows are not black, they have color in them. There's also reflected light http://www.cheapjoes.com/art-instruction/art-lessons/tip-001-reflected-light.asp (that gets into what I'm talking about when talking about reflected light). Your midtones may have more color in them than the highlights which may be tinted. It depends on the mood.

Also everything has this airbrush look and not form. Not all edges are soft. This is why people will tell you about "learning the planes of form". You need to know what kind of rises, levels, bumps etc objects have because it affects the edge. This thread talks about edges and why they're important. http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51913 This is why the "soft airbrush look" tends to look bad when trying to convey the figure if you don't know your anatomy or understand mass, form and planes.

Ok, let's talk about the Deathlord and what you don't understand. I'll try to make it simple. If you have a line in your drawing, make sure it describes something. We often refer to this as Line Economy. http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2009/05/walt-stanchfield-bookdon-hahn.html I'm seeing lines in your deathlord that do not describe cloth nor describe anything else. If it's not describing something you either need to fix the line to describe it or take it out. Otherwise things look rushed and not thought out.


This is a very quick mockup of things I'd play with as you can see I'm starting on making the clouds look more like clouds and trying to fix the background, but it would take a lot more work. Ideas I was messing with is making the deathlord look more nebulous - but I also have some lines asking why do you have them there?

Like I said it's a mockup because I work on the Large of things first, then worry about details. Meaning, you get the basic forms right, then slowly work your way to details, because even if you leave some details out, our eyes have this ability to look at shapes and figure it out for us. It also causes you to gaze longer at the picture, when you learn how to do it.


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## Pogiforce (Feb 5, 2012)

Okay, I think I'm starting to understand. Not all shading is soft, nor simple shades of lighter and darker. And I need to show more care on what lines I decide to keep.

DO you have any other suggestions for backgrounds and environments? Even when I pull from a reference My backgrounds always end up horrid...


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 5, 2012)

Well I can recommend books, it's really all practice and understanding you'll make a lot of mistakes before you get better. Trust me, all good artists and budding artists go through a lot of crap to get better. I think it's harder for people who are just starting to understand because experienced artists make it look more effortless - but it's all just experience and practice. Unfortunately even me telling you this, it's hard for another person to understand because we all have our different levels of progress and we can't exactly be in each others shoes.

The book Art & Fear is a book I recommended in the Critiques forums http://forums.furaffinity.net/threa...r-be-good-as-an-artist-Message-of-Inspiration it's really kind of an "Artist's Bible" in the sense it's a guide not about the basic forms of art but how you should approach your "artistic beliefs" like...a Chicken soup I suppose.

I also recommend something that helps break down things like perspective into more simple terms.
http://amzn.com/0486404730

I'd also try to grab Jack Hamm's Drawing Landscapes and scenery. It's also got great pencil exercises to get you to learn how to create textures in pencil form.
http://amzn.com/0399508066


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## Centradragon (Feb 5, 2012)

I think Arshes covered a lot of useful topics, so I'm going to try my best to touch on different things that might help you (I'm going to focus on "Epic Clash" to make things a bit easier to follow).


Whenever I'm not sure about a light source, I always make my paintings black and white to check and see if it still makes "visual sense."

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19128585/PogiBW.jpg

It's really hard to focus on the important parts of your painting (I'm drawn to the mountain and can't pull my eyes away past the busyness of the textured forest). Trees will never be that detailed from that far away, and the colors will be changed because of atmospheric perspective. You can easily see atmospheric perspective at work in this photograph, and in this one as well. Check out the bright yellow-green in this photograph... you can really tell the sun's hitting the grass and plant life. As the water's also pretty far away, you don't have to worry about making all the ripples/wave lines. You could set it up as a flat blue base color, then use an airbrush to do gentle gradients. Check out this reference... See how simple the water is? Other than the shadows from the mountains, it's mostly just a smooth gradient. Here's another example. You can even add in some green if it's a very algae-y lake.

I highly recommend getting rid of most of the default Photoshop brushes that are for grass and leaves. They're amateur and not actually very useful. Grass flows and waves, and isn't always bent at that exact "bent" angle. Some is extremely short or extremely long. There are little cool weeds in grass. Wild grass has a lot of different stuff growing in it. DON'T worry about drawing every single blade of grass... you'll get frustrated and never want to draw plants again. Generalize as much as you can â€” and if you're stuck, look how other artists render grass. Van Gogh used a minimum amount of lines and patches to convey the "movement" of grass... notice how easily and comfortably your eyes can follow it. Also remember that grass doesn't cover every square inch of dirt. There are rocks, flowers, moss, fissures, bare patches... interesting things that will make the field seem more natural and not like a stiff, well-manicured lawn.

Rocks also have many different looks and colors to them. Look how absolutely mind-numbingly gorgeous these rocks are. They've been weathered and cracked, with obvious shadows. Some rocks are downright bizarre-looking, and depending on how they're formed can look out of this world. Nature is far more interesting than it may seem, so I encourage you to look up references, buy books, and spend time on them. I took geology classes for this exact reason â€” extremely useful for art.

In addition, the clouds are rather lackluster... they look more like pieces of weird cotton floating by. You might be able to see through the very edges of a cloud, but a lot of times it's actually pretty opaque. Light hits it, and it's white... you can't really see through it. Even fog is pretty hard to see through. Clouds aren't Scooby Doo ghosts... you can go through them, but they look like solid objects from far away. One of the most vivid memories I have as a child is when I was climbing a mountain â€” with clouds racing by at my feet. You could literally get lost if the cloud cover was thick enough.


It looks like you mostly spent time on the characters... which is fine, but since you want to want to convey something "epic"... well, you can't use default brushes and random textures on something that sets the entire world for your story. Look up "Photoshop vegetation brushes" online. You'd be surprised at how many awesome free brushes are out there.


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## FireFeathers (Feb 12, 2012)

Saved like...half those images that centra linked for my own inspiration, lol.

The only thing i can think to add would be composition work. The only time sideface to sideface works is when you're playing Mortal Kombat.  You have a very epic intention with very flat composition, they'd actually work better int he composition if you had them playing chess, lol. The other thing is the guy's cape...darkness on the top. You have to be very careful about objects that sit on the side.  If you're trying to connect them to something in the picture, like your cape, the lines leading out and back in should look like they came from the same line. Since it's 3 am and I stop making sense about this time, I'll demonstrate: http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i141/Raydart/demo.jpg

Though it's just something to remember in the future, by swirling the cape around like that, you're framing what you can use in the future as an important object you want to bring focus to. But that's the mountain in this picture, so swirly cape is not helping the composition.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 12, 2012)

To be honest, I would have expanded the canvas instead of doing the closed thin shape on the top for the cape. I was just going for the "nebula" thing when I did the paintover to demonstrate the idea the OP was explaining to me earlier. Or I may have eliminated the cape/nebula coming from that side entirely - unless I wanted to do it to affect lighting. Where the character would be shadowed by that color. 

The Epic Battle needs a more widescreen style of composition, than this box shape that's cramping everything up.  You know, kinda like how Ryan church uses a more rectangular composition - gives it that epic widescreen movie (well he does concept work for movies so it makes sense) http://www.ryanchurch.com/


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## FireFeathers (Feb 12, 2012)

Arshes Nei said:


> To be honest, I would have expanded the canvas instead of doing the closed thin shape on the top for the cape. I was just going for the "nebula" thing when I did the paintover to demonstrate the idea the OP was explaining to me earlier. Or I may have eliminated the cape/nebula coming from that side entirely - unless I wanted to do it to affect lighting. Where the character would be shadowed by that color.
> 
> The Epic Battle needs a more widescreen style of composition, than this box shape that's cramping everything up.  You know, kinda like how Ryan church uses a more rectangular composition - gives it that epic widescreen movie (well he does concept work for movies so it makes sense) http://www.ryanchurch.com/




Honestly i didn't realize that it was a part of your paintover; I saw the original, but was having trouble getting back on FA, so i snagged your paint over because I thought what you had changed was adding words to it. I didn't realize- i obviously can't check now because FA's down, but yeah, I wasn't aware.


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## Arshes Nei (Feb 12, 2012)

FireFeathers said:


> Honestly i didn't realize that it was a part of your paintover; I saw the original, but was having trouble getting back on FA, so i snagged your paint over because I thought what you had changed was adding words to it. I didn't realize- i obviously can't check now because FA's down, but yeah, I wasn't aware.



Oh no, don't even worry about it. When the original was up it had these streaky lines that didn't describe anything and went against the folds of the cloth (that's why I said "what are these lines for") on the paintover.

I didn't want to go too much into resizing the whole thing to make it look more Epic. I mean I gave a pretty long critique as is. So I don't mind the suggestion to merge the forms, I just wanted to explain what else I would have done to change the picture.


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