08-15-2013, 03:57 AM
Welcome to the daggers, I've taken a quick look at your work here and some on your deviantart and these are my thoughts on a few issues you seem to be having. This is not a personal attack on you or your work I'm just trying to give some insight the best I can to help you improve so please don't take it the wrong way and leave the forums ;) -
Values, Describing form, edges and perspective seem to be the main issues. One of the problems you're having is your work is looking overly flat, this is due mainly to the use of a very close value range in your images where your darks and lights are mostly to close on the value scale and the that is coupled with a lack of atmospheric perspective in your images with backgrounds where the things further away aren't light enough on the value scale. And due to the limited value range your paintings tend to look flat. One thing to remember when painting is think of it as if you were painting an actual 3D model and let your brush strokes form over it as if it was 3D.
As for edges your work seems to be done a lot with the soft round brush, which is fine, but there tends to be a lack of hard or firm edges in your work (this can also be helped by addressing your use of values, dark next to a light can create a sort of harder edge with the contrast of the 2 values). This is a resource someone linked me to when i first came here concerning the use of edges - http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51913 it's a very good written resource to refer to and apply what you learn.
Other than that what I would suggest is doing some studies using only value and no colour, this will help you to improve your use of values and see some of the issues and learn how to resolve them for yourself. There are a great many resources here to help you lean and youtube is also full of great videos should you ish to check some out (FZD school being one of my personal favourites , though feng zhu does not go into a lot of fundamentals, but i believe he does have a video series where he is using just value and you can see there how using a wider range of values can help to improve an image).
Well I hope that was of some help and I look forward to seeing your progress here :)
Values, Describing form, edges and perspective seem to be the main issues. One of the problems you're having is your work is looking overly flat, this is due mainly to the use of a very close value range in your images where your darks and lights are mostly to close on the value scale and the that is coupled with a lack of atmospheric perspective in your images with backgrounds where the things further away aren't light enough on the value scale. And due to the limited value range your paintings tend to look flat. One thing to remember when painting is think of it as if you were painting an actual 3D model and let your brush strokes form over it as if it was 3D.
As for edges your work seems to be done a lot with the soft round brush, which is fine, but there tends to be a lack of hard or firm edges in your work (this can also be helped by addressing your use of values, dark next to a light can create a sort of harder edge with the contrast of the 2 values). This is a resource someone linked me to when i first came here concerning the use of edges - http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51913 it's a very good written resource to refer to and apply what you learn.
Other than that what I would suggest is doing some studies using only value and no colour, this will help you to improve your use of values and see some of the issues and learn how to resolve them for yourself. There are a great many resources here to help you lean and youtube is also full of great videos should you ish to check some out (FZD school being one of my personal favourites , though feng zhu does not go into a lot of fundamentals, but i believe he does have a video series where he is using just value and you can see there how using a wider range of values can help to improve an image).
Well I hope that was of some help and I look forward to seeing your progress here :)