Nice piece on the whole! Lots of elements I like here like how you tackled her skin tone and tail and I think the water splashes work quite well and sell the effect. I think if I had to pick a few areas I would tweak would be now that you added the rain it feels like her hair should sit heavier and bit more clumped. Kind of similar to the silhouette in this process pic you had in your process gif which looks great
Also I still feel the scale of the ship is still a little off as I kind of looks like the pirate is at the front of a small row boat and the larger ship is more in the distance behind him which could have been a cool effect if decided to go that way as if he was taking a small boat ashore to see the babe.
but great work and you are a credit to how open you are to feedback and how you respond to everyone’s suggestions is admirable. Kudos to you dude keep up the great work and even better attitude.
Really cool to see all the improvement you've made over the years! I think the mermaid piece has a lot of great qualities (really nice vibrant colors, depth, expression on her face, etc.). I like CBinn's approach to the more night-time paintover, I wanted to also add in my two cents.
Take this paintover with a grain of salt since I don't fully know the story of this image and the world etc., but I wanted to make a couple of points from the perspective of a daytime scene (the rainbow is what made me think daytime).
I think simplifying the image would help to push the story a lot more; right now there is so many details that are taking my attention. That may just be because there is a lot of contrast in a lot of stuff. Using less contrast in places that aren't focal points could help solve this I think. So I just sort of simplified a lot of the background to make it only about the approaching ship coming from a rocky area and made her eyes look even further in that direction to reinforce the connection.
I also pushed the rocks and the ships detail and contrast lower to increase the sense of depth (this could be pushed further by adding more depth to the water and having more overlaps and such as well. I think having the ship being so close just feels unrealistic at the moment because of the sizes of things like the masts in relation to the people etc. I'm not an expert on nautical stuff though so again, take this with a big grain of salt.
I would say NC Wyeth is probably a great artist to look at to study for this kind of thing since he did the Treasure Island illustrations and was a grandmaster of composition. Not sure if any of my notes helped but I hope you were able to take something away from it at least. I think you added a lot of really cool details and textures; I just think overall playing some of that down in order to bring more attention to the focal point might help, and just increasing the sense of scale relationships between the approaching ship and the foreground and stuff could help.
Lunatique: That's very interesting as that seems to be where I'm at now, especially in regards to the current mermaid image. In general I love the detailing process, it's a lot of fun for me to bring to life but the downside to this is creating many points of interest as you stated... too many focal points which can overwhelm the viewer.
As for my favorite artists, they all paint in a realistic style, some more painterly than others. My favoritie artists growing up were Boris Vallejo/ Julie Bell and Alex Ross... specifically with how believable their work looked and their approach to lighting. I love experimenting with dynamic lighting for my images. Currently I'm gravating towards artists with a more expressive style while still creating a believable look - some of my favorites include Howard Lyon and Cynthia Sheppard as well as a ton of others... way too many to name.
I do feel most comfortable with a smooth style and it allows me to play up the details as well, but I really appreciate the more painterly yet detailed look of the artists mentioned if that makes sense!
CBinnsIllustration: Thanks for your input as always! Initially I wanted to go with a night setting but I did that recently with the Viking image... I also figured I can create more visual depth with a brighter image so it gradually changes as I progressed. Not sure if that was the right call, but here we are! I made some changes based on your feedback as well, thanks again!
jeremygordonart: Some really excellent feedback here! I agree about the contrast and depth, it's a bit too much so I just toned it down. Hopefully things look more natural now. I think you also forgot to attach your paintover you mentioned, would love to see it especially with regards to your feedback, should be very useful so please feel free to post it again if you wish!
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I resumed work on the image... I toned down the contrast a bit, blurred a lot of the background to make the figure pop out more and give it a greater sense of depth... I think it's an improvement. I'm still open to feedback so if something still feels off please feel free to let me know! Below is the current preview:
Overall it looks good, I think the main issue is probably the composition itself.
Theres lots of stuff of going on the same time.
I attached you a little very rough layout what I mean.
If you think about a composition like a cocktail glass that has to be filled
with ingredients, you need to be clear what tastenote is your main "star" in the
drink. The mermaid is the clear star and focal point but the other parts like the
rocks, the ship, the treasure etc. dont have a clear visual hirachy.
For example the rock right next to the tresure is bigger than the treasure itself.
The leafs on the right are also bigger than the treasure.
The shipbow is on the same height and size as the rock that is on the same midground plane.
Sometimes it helps to create these "triangles of importance" its like a moving rubberband
that creates a secondary micro composition within your objects.
The rocks on the front of a coast usually are not so clean, seaweed and moss is often
seen on the surface. Adding this material would also help to get more contrast tones
into the scene. I hope you dont mind my super rough paintover and nodes.
(Im in the train atm)
Keep up the good work!
Just want to come and support by boy by saying your commitment to incorporate critism is examplary but might be damagable to your overall well being as it push you to commit to project longer then it might be healthy. I personally think you should move on. Playing around an image that as been push to a render stage is alot of work.
We have talk about this a will ago i am still convince there is more to be done during the thumbnailing stage that would avoid all the comment being cramp toward the end the thing is a project can go very well and thing go to the lineart phase without much problem and suddenly the color and value problem start to pill up.Thing would be solve at a much more flexible moment if only you would spend more time thumbnailling your value hierarchy testing different image scenario but i cant force you to try it you will probably eventually find out that you been negligent in that realm.The thing is you commit to putting all your idea into one image and that not necessarily going to be resulting in a strong image.But actually the thing i would suggest you do is to be able to come up with different rought image and then let those preliminary thumbnail inform you as to where to move on.Because what you tend to do is go to heavy toward the end of the project and i suspect that what hurt the visual hierachy because it easy to loose the visual hierachy toward the end when you want everything to feel like it as it place .
I still encourage you to take a slower approch to your project now that we have a bit more people beside me to make critic your project will get better because you get alot more feed back at a earlier stage without the need to wait unreasonable amount of time or have to work on multiple project to wait for feedback.
Maybe you dont like planning and love rendering that i can understand.Let me just say that delaying rendering is more brain heavy but it in my opinion give better result that why it important to understand how to be able to take a step back looking if thing are going in the right direction and delay gratification.
I honestly agree with darktiste's comment. I think the mermaid piece turned out pretty well, and you incorporated the feedback from earlier in the process. So it's good, but at this point it is hard to change it too much in a finished state. I think it's interesting how from the process gif I see that it was originially night time, or early morning for this piece, which I think worked well, and then evolved to be daylight, and then raining, and then with a rainbow. And none of those things are bad, but it means the end result doesn't actually look much like the thumbnail or planning stages (except in the drawing). Ideally your rough painting should pretty much be what the painting is going to look like and that's the time to figure out composition stuff and lighting. Catch any issues early before much time has been spent rendering.
I'm definitely guilty of that too sometimes where my paintings are VERY rough and vague and then suddenly it's finished. It can work, but it would be cool to see you refine your process more and spend more time on each aspect of the piece: drawing, composition, lighting etc. And that way you end up with a stronger finished image.
TrashPanda: Great input, and I appreciate the paintover as well, very helpful! I love what you stated in regards to composition, I'll keep this in mind when coming up with new sketches and concepts. I just revised the painting heavily based on your paintover and I'm happy with the improvements, so I really appreciate it!
darktiste: Thank you for your support as always! You've made some great points, and I'll definitely incorporate thumbnailing for my new illustrations when I get the chance. I actually use this technique for most of my freelance work but don't incorporate it much for my personal pieces strangely, I think it's because I generally have a clear idea of what I want to do but thumbnails can help improve on that foundation so I agree with your input. With that said I think the mermaid image is done now, just posted it below!
JosephCow: Thanks! And yeah sometimes I make drastic changes as I work on the image, almost as if it's taking on a life of it's own. I try to be more careful of this and it doesn't happen as often as it used to, but in this case I just felt the values were stronger with the lighter tones. Great feedback and suggestions as well, thank you for that!
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Thanks to everyone for the awesome feedback, I feel the image improved greatly since receiving the critiques and implementing them, so I'm very thankful. I made some final changes to the illustration and I'm officially calling it finished. Looking forward to creating a new mermaid for next year's challenge as well, learned a lot with this image and will definitely be applying what I learned to new illustrations! Below is the final image:
George — last time I lurked on CD you mentioned feeling run down and I thought it might slow you down — but the mermaid pic looks great! That entire painting vibrates with energy!
I hope you were able to take a little time off and that helped rejuvenate you. Don't forget to take care of yourself along the way. I force myself to take one day off a week where I just relax and goof off. Hope you're doing something similar.
Jephyr: Thank you for the positive words! I took a bit of a break just recently spending time with relatives so I had a bit of a vacation which did a lot of good for me!
In general I try to take the weekends off, but a lot of times I end up doing some personal artwork. But yeah, great suggestions and I really appreciate your support!
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Trying to take things at a much slower pace now. I finished up a recent personal illustration I did for fun and something that was quite within my comfort zone so bringing it to life was a blast. Below is the image followed by some steps for those interested. Feedback is welcome as always!
It's good that you took a break I think. Taking a step back and reflecting and maybe even analyzing your work when you're not involved in it intensely can make a big difference in the long run.
My simple advise would be to pay more attention to the value in your metallic and not simplify the value.
A simple way to deal with large batch of small detail is to create a clipping mask this way you stay within the shape let say you got a layers for the shoulder and you create a clipping mask for the metallic detail in that way you are sure you don't have to clean up between what under and what your trying to paint.
For even more control you can create a custom selection for the shadow and for the highlight that if you use photoshop.In the select menu/save selection (You must have an active selection**) You can then load the selection if you want to shift between the light or the dark.I find it best to separe the light and dark on two clipping mask that goes over the layer where the detail originate from using selection because selection can create pixel and is more tricky when value shift.
Also ''always'' consider eye socket in the shadow side to be darker then the one in the light just like the nostril obviously if a light hit from the front ignore this advise. Also consider that you will have a stronger terminator if you got two light source that are casting light from different opposite direction so when the light meet you should have your darkest dark(example the neck i didn't do the rest to highlight this point)
That skull texture is really nice did you use some kind of photobashing?
one_two: Glad you agree! Great suggestions too, will do!
darktiste: Great point! A lot of the armor and metallic design is in shadows so I didn't want to go too crazy with the contrast since shadowed areas don't require too much amount of detail. Love what you did with the eye sockets, nose, and drop shadow. Just implemented those based on your excellent paintover, thank you for that! Glad you enjoy the skull texture - that was done mostly with custom textured brushes as well as some slight photo textures to speeed things up a bit which is pretty much how I handle all my texture work.
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I did some final refining and a bit more detail work to the image. I think I'm gonna call it final for now unless there is something majorly off with this one. Will take another short break and focus more on my lighting studies before tackling another big painting. Thanks again to everyone who posted with their support and suggestions as always!
I think the only thing i mislead and you kind play into unvoluntary was the shadow shape on the cranium i think you had the light better before now we loose some of it roundness my bad i was slapping the image seeing where thing could use a bit of contrast but something i am not so concern about the shape as much as i was focusing creating that visual path.
Good job and what are you going to focus on in those light study?
darktiste: Ah yes, good point! Just fixed the issue and restored the roundness of the skull. As for the next lighting studies, I think a mix of simple primitive shapes and some skull studies would be ideal. Really enjoy drawing and painting skulls so I think it would be a great opportunity to study them as a subject for more lighting studies! Thanks again for your help!
