Star Trek fan art/bookcover

[Simonarpalmer]

Hey everyone!
I painted this piece of fan art to be a book cover to a story I quickly made up beforehand, but it just doesn't look finished to me, and I don't think pumping it full of details is the solution, so I would be super grateful for any critique to help me figure out what it needs or where I went wrong!

[SamC]

Hey there,


Nice image, I can see you've got a good grasp on a lot of things. One thing I'd say is to focus on your focal points more, by using different types of edges, colour and contrast to lead the eye. Currently, there are sharp edges all over, that greens all over, and they're very close in contrast. I basically softened up a lot of unnecessary edges, mainly in the people at the back, changed them to be reddish, upped the contrast in the foreground. Added some soft gradient from the floor to create a bit more depth. Compositionally, there was quite a lot of dead space around the edges and at the top, that I felt were drawing the eye too much, and throwing off your thirds. Mostly its just using things in a more subtle way in order to draw interest and not over-work yourself unnecessarily. Other stuff: the spears making a pretty bad tangent with the head, but this can probably be fixed by lowering slightly and softening. She's very small on the canvas, but this might be necessary for the book, I don't know.

Hope this helps, keep up the cool work :)

[Simonarpalmer]

Thank you very much Sam! Very helpful, I started over with a new sketch based on your critique, that I believe is much better. I tried to clearly seperate all planes with contrast and color, and create two focal points, with the large female face being the dominant one, and the dark foreground woman's face being secondary, and I will make sure to let areas outside of them be less sharp and defined when I render the painting.

[Simonarpalmer]

Here's the new image, I think it turned out a lot better than the original! Thanks again for the helpful critique!