CGMythology's Sketchbook

[ognjiša]

Yo,cg! I hope you wouldn't mind a quick critique.

The biggest problem i see with the last painting (and many older ones as well) is weak composition, more specifically, the values not being grouped and all over the place. Another thing (which ties into composition) is your use of saturation. You seem to have a tendency to oversaturate almost everything. The same thing applies to your use of edges and detail - almost everything is a hard edge and everything has minute, hard-edged, high-contrast details.

You obviously have a pretty good grasp on drawing - you can draw figures fairly solidly and construct objects in 3 dimensions. There are the occasional perspective problems, but i think those are mostly due to a lack of planning, focus or patience, maybe (nobody wants to draw the perspective grid lol)

Now, the problem with not grouping values is that the viewer gets confused about where to look - the value contrast is the same allover and so the eye can't find a focal point, which is very unpleasant. 
The problem with having high saturation all over the place is much the same - the viewer can't tell the important from the non-important stuff, and the whole image becomes just jarring and confusing. 


Here's my little overpaint of your thing. I think you had it going a bit better in the earlier versions before you brightened up the bottom of the sky. 



Firstly, i just lowered the saturation of everything that wasn't going to be the focal point. The whole dragon, for example, was wayy too saturated all over. I also lowered the brightness of the sky (you had a very small, very saturated and bright chunk right in the corner, horribly distracting), and that lowered the value contrast between the sky and the rocks at the bottom. You don't want people seeing the bottom part of the image 1st because you don't have anything important there. You want  the first thing the viewer sees to be your focal point, after which he moves to the secondary focal point, and then is guided through the image and brought back to the focal point once again. That's the effect that i was going for by lowering the saturation and value contrast on the peripheral and unimportant parts. I also cropped the image to have a bit more space on the edge so that the fire (being the brightest and most saturated thing) wouldn't be all the way on the edge.

The second thing relating to the composition is the amount of tangents you've got going on, most notably the ones where the rocks touch the edge of the painting, the aforementioned tiny bit of sky in the corner, and that little sliver of sky left on the right side between the edge of the painting and the wing. Tangents are generally very distracting and unsettling, and it's best to avoid them unless you're really putting them somewhere on purpose to cause a specific effect.
Sinix's got a good video on tangents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJIWllIMHsg

Next thing that i fixed up a bit and had already mentioned is the undiscriminating application of texture (i like that you haven't got the dragon scales going on in the shadows, but the shadows are so deep that you couldn't even put them there if you wanted). The texture of any object under direct lighting (such as you've got here) is going to be the most visible on the edge between light and shadow, and so that's where you ought to emphasize it the most. Elsewhere it's best if its merely implied and not too distracting. A small part of the object with clear texture and some loose implication on other places is enough to tell the viewer that the entire object is textured.

Here's a good example of the texture being most visible on the terminator (especially if you squint at it), although this texture seems way deeper than what you've got going on,:


Oh yeah and i just did a quick version with the dragon being larger. If you made the dragon large enough, his shadows side would have been one dark mass, and the light parts on the girl would read much better


A few other smaller things i would look out for:

Breaking up the spacing, and the shapes of your rock pieces so that you've got a nice variety of big, medium and small shapes (specifically having more large shapes so you don't distract attention from the focal point)

Probably having lighter shadows since they're being filled up by the indirect light coming from the sky

Having stronger contact shadows aka ambient occlusion (especially for the dragon, he hasn't even got a contact shadow)

And practical stuff i would suggest to improve:

Doing composition thumbnails and focusing on the big massed of grouped value (try using only a light, medium and dark value for your composition planning)

Reading Framed Ink, it's a great book on composition and narration in art (if you can't find it hmu ill shoot you a link)

Studying paintings of artists you admire/old masters and figuring out why their compositions work 

Hope that was helpful! : D