Hi! I'm here to give myself some accountability and work on my weaknesses.
Old stuff here <--and a partial piece below just so I have something visual in my first post:
This sketchbook will be about the journey not its start nor end so I'll keep things brief! Items one and two on the list are loose sketches and anatomy which I've been neglecting for years now.
A female Vertumnus? My critic would be that you may be saturating the colors a bit too far. But if you want the face to read somewhat like a puzzle, it can be a good thing. Waiting to see the next stage of the WIP.
PS: The mood in your Danger Dog sequential on ArtStation is spot on!
@Darktiste -Quality feedback, thanks! It already looks better ^^
@Leo Ki - My gut reaction is always "no shit" when people mention my saturation issues (due to the subject matter) but it doesn't hurt to try lowering it and did help. So thanks! I'm not going full vegetable on this one, I'll add in some feline texturing and other weird stuff once I'm done with the flower arrangements (this really is a dumb painting!).
The Danger Dog piece was done during a comics course but the teachers either didn't like it or didn't feel qualified to talk about it, same for the other students. It was a really weird university course where the teachers were quasi-absent and that I ended up teaching out of sheer boredom. Anyway, glad someone liked the page even if it's a year and half later!
On the plus side, this reminds me I need to revamp my sequentials, I haven't reworked those samples for ~four years? I remember taking them down at some point out of shame then putting them back up as placeholders. That was three years ago now!
Ok, onto less serious things: my client work has dried up until the week-end so here's another wip.
It's currently in the layout and polishing phases while also being in every step in-between!
What going on no collarbone and what going on with the hand?I don't understand what going on with her hair it like her hair are in a bag of some kind.The left side flowing line from the waterfall i don't like how they lead the eye out of the piece.There also the line at the bottom right that conflict with the silhouette of the women you might want to avoid them touching.Your control of black a white is still pretty impressive nothing less but yea it an art to make thing read with such a limited amount of value.
@darktiste - It'll only get messier/more confusing before things start to make sense. My anatomy is pretty lazy/bad though but I'll get to fixing it eventually (aiming for sooner though!).
@Pubic Enemy - Thanks & More water incoming! Gotta figure out the top half of her now!
Still plenty of work to be done. I want comic industry veterans to look at this and go "Ima noob" so I'm putting the bar for what I'll consider completion pretty high!
If I understand correctly that last piece is about inking. I can not give advice on that, since I never inked.
The anatomy is a bit weird, mostly the pose of the arms, but in art you never know what the artist wanted to do, so maybe you even wanted it to look like that. You already mentioned yourself that your anatomy needs more work, so you already know that.
Besides that, maybe post more stuff in your sketchbook, you dont have a lot of works shown in here.
@graphicnovelist - Yeah, I need to get to the anatomy. I'm grouping my values at the moment but will get to it eventually. More "sketchbook" wips below. I consider my ipad to be my sketchbook but haven't worked on anything unpolished for a while now.
Anyway, here's an update. I'm currently working on shading the face before moving onto lightening the waterfall and darkening the foreground and background. Gonna see if I can get some mist going at some point as well.
Let me rephrase: Saturation itself is not a problem, it's the lack of contrasts in the saturation of various areas that can hurt readability. Similar to a lack of contrast in lightness values can hurt volume.
I like the ink variation of the character (last image above) and in this case the whole talk about contrast has to be adjusted for this specific style. At this point I'm unsure what to make off the large white shapes.
The rocky scenery just before is wonderfully enigmatic.
And regarding your "old" comic don't underestimate the power of past inspiration ;)
I find the scene to charged but there not necessarly something interesting in there either.Idk what was the goal of this piece but it not clear to me. I would probably put that white tower in the distance instead to create a more balance compositon atm i feel like the only interesting stuff seem to be on the right there an interesting rythme in the piece but it not that clear also.
What i feel looking at your scene is impression of being small and lost.I think my main issue is with ''the tower'' it in the 4 corner of interest meaning it at the right spot but the problem is that it not balance i think when you have 2 object on the same side of the image it create something unbalanced.
I tried to show you want i meant.I also change the scale a bit on the character to give it more visual weight.
