How to add more impact?

[AdamMiconi]

Hey Adam,

First off you can definitely render and I think you have some really solid skills. I think some work on the fundamentals of perspective, composition, anatomy and dynamic sketching would really help you get more impact from your various figurative poses and illustrations. It's always easy to lose dynamism of your original gestures when starting to render; one thing that has helped me recently is to keep my original gestural and dynamic sketch on a separate layer, and always refer back to it when beginning to render to make sure I haven't lost any of the original action. You can always tweak things back to where they should be. Give it a go! :)

I did a paintover of your first piece. You picked that the pose was pretty static, but anatomically there were also issues. I think the torso looks pretty short and the arms really big with massive hands...her shoulders are pretty hunched and her breasts look like they don't have weight to them. The drapery also needed a bit of work.
You wanted impact of the figure, but the majority of the canvas was white. Hard to make much impact against that, so I made it dark. I tweaked her pose and anatomy, just making it a bit more dynamic. I then converted to grayscale to work only in value. Added detail and drapery. The thing about drapery is that folds are always created when the cloth interacts with a surface or leaves a surface, so the form underneath is very important for determining the fold structure. There are only 5-6 basic fold types. drawing fabric folds I used diaper, drop and zig zag. Once you understand what creates them it's quite simple to apply them from your head (I'm not saying drapery is easy btw!) Studies are the best way of getting better at them.
I added colour back in...(simple overlay) then added some lighting to pop her out a bit more and used a lighter background to add some contrast and hopefully make the figure more dramatic. Hope that helps!

**Not sure if this worked..but it's an animated gif....just open it in a new tab if it's not animating :)
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Man, this is great! This helps so much not only hearing the terms you are talking about but actually getting to seem them in the animation. I absolutely love the new pose and I think I'm going to go with it since it maintains the static read but adds a lot of dynamic interest in the overall piece. Very cool!

It's funny you mention anatomy, I actually get that a lot. I have done so many studies on anatomy and I know the names of nearly every muscle and what they do but actually drawing them, the knowledge doesn't relate to the drawing. It's very frustrating since I know how they "should" look but I can't seem to actually draw it that way. Know your weaknesses and attack them, right?!

I definitely like the darker background, I see what you mean about it making it more dynamic, it really helps bring the color out compared to the white. I also love how you did the diaper fold with the extra turns and zig zags, it's so much better than just simply 'rolling' like it was before. Great stuff!

I really appreciate you taking the time to do this paintover for me. It has helped so much!

I'm really lovin' the community here so far, you guys have been very cool!