Heya
Gone too long without proper critique from my peers and my edge has dulled because of it. Going to be uploading public pieces from now for you guys to pick apart. Starting with this one.
Hey there, I see you can render the forms well, now the only thing to fix is the lighting direction. In your image it is all over the place, there is like 3-4 different lightsources. Also you tend to go to blacks too fast, it is good to be subtler in your values, a lot of stuff is popping out too much, it makes it look overblown. Its better to make a character with 1 lightsource that looks correct then it is to make an incorrect character with 4 lightsources.
Also It is recommended that you do some sort of a background to figure out reflected lights and lighting in general.
Also check this out it has many pointers on various fundamentals and it is concise
http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm
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Great stuff. Thanks for taking the time to give me a comprehensive critique. I especially like what you said about going to blacks too fast.
Chaotic lightsources and values are things that have dogged me for years now. But I think I'm slowly beginning to come around.
During the day yesterday also received some crits on FB which echoed yours. (Which I only got to see this morning.) So I was also working on updating it last night.
This is why I'm so glad to be back here. Only wish I'd done it sooner. Really need to get progress back on track.