Nikel's sketchbook

[Nikelart]

with your initial naked girl, youre doing a lot of things very well, like her body is pretty nice, and her hands are not bad; her eyes feel cartoony as theyre pure white, in reality they might be darker, but its not necessarily wrong so to speak. 

her stance feels strange to me, both feet are on tip toes, but shes not standing on anything, which you could make the case that shes floating, but her legs have some proportion issues. Typically the calve is about the same length as the thigh. i want you to imagine her leg thats forward, going back to the same position the other leg is in straightened. that leg would be 1.5X longer than the other in the thigh area. Also if both her feet are tiptoed, they almost are not on the same plane, so the size difference is strange. 

Now again youve shown a lot of advanced things here, im seeing gastrocnemius indication, you know nice patella, nice planes on the face, but the feet are lagging behind. The foot on the longer leg feels like its missing a little bit of length and the other foot feels amateur and out of place compared to the very nice anatomy on the rest of the body. 

The background clashes with the green leaves on her head. Is she in fire? why does she have a crown of leaves? an all black background might help things blend more, you have a ton of warm tones and very little control of the values in the background as the feet disappear and are unreadable from far away. Her head feels a tad big and some of her fingers like (her) right index finger has disappeared and im not buying that its behind the middle finger, and her left ring finger could use some lovin.

(also her vagina will not be in front of the adductor but the adductor will overlap it, and you could even add some small change of form as the mounds go into the crotch as they are facing away from the light instead of the flat black line you have)

So, the other paintings are pretty cool, might even be able to sell em you have a pretty vibrant style and nice thick strokes, so... i hope youll keep posting and inspire us :)

Thank you very much for such a thorough critique, I really appreciate your time! I have make a lot of these changes, but i still have some work to do and I'll update when I've finished. 

To answer your questions, my initial idea was that i wanted to show turmoil in most of the painting but have these lovely leaves at the top to kind of illustrate all of the struggle that happens in life, but that there is still beauty. It was a big project for me though and I'm not sure I'll be able to successfully pull it off. I am still learning how to use paint and I'm much better with portraits in which you don't have to worry so much about grounding XD. 

However, i have learned a *ton* making this thing and even more than I expected from the feedback I'm getting here! So I'll definitely keep updating and trying to improve.

It's really encouraging to hear that you think that those two paintings are sellable! Thank you again for taking the time to write this out! :)