Critique requested, thanks!

[jerryjr261]

I have been working on this for awhile now trying to really push value and color. What do you guys think so far about the composition and value and is there anything you would do different? thanks!

Edit* Had to update to most recent version.

[ChantalFournier]

You have picked a very tough lighting situation. The alien is pretty good, but the guy, not as much, I feel like you have ref for one, but not the other. I also feel like the gun should cast a shadow on the guy, his nose should definitely cast a shadow on his cheek and eye. Also, the alien has a kind of cold rim light on his head but not on it's arms, and the guy has no rim light at all. I'm not sure what the orangey brown stuff at the bottom left is. If it's fire, he would die even without an alien there. If it's smoke, should that gun really produce smoke like that?!?!? Is it just that you didn't want to draw the alien body?

[jerryjr261]

You have picked a very tough lighting situation. The alien is pretty good, but the guy, not as much, I feel like you have ref for one, but not the other. I also feel like the gun should cast a shadow on the guy, his nose should definitely cast a shadow on his cheek and eye. Also, the alien has a kind of cold rim light on his head but not on it's arms, and the guy has no rim light at all. I'm not sure what the orangey brown stuff at the bottom left is. If it's fire, he would die even without an alien there. If it's smoke, should that gun really produce smoke like that?!?!? Is it just that you didn't want to draw the alien body?

It has been a very tough illustration. I did have a ref for the Alien but not the soldier, the arms and hands of the alien are incomplete but thanks for the heads up about the cool light along the head of the alien, I might not have produced similar results on the arms and hands. It may be too extreme to begin with. I am going to draw the rest of the alien but i wanted it behind the smoke, It's part of the environment not from the gun. the gun fire is just causing the smoke to illuminate which seems to be lacking in realism quite a bit. I'm not so happy with how saturated everything is, I wanted a more realistic approach and everything turned out more cartoony than desired. Thanks for the info about the shadows as well, theres a lot i still need to study so I always appreciate feedback on what would help me improve. Thanks again for your input!

[delCid]

I couldn't have done this painting better than you did but I thought it could help.
Just the way I see it, very rough changes on the human and just a little bit more dark.
hope it is somehow useful :S

[Amit Dutta]

Just briefly the transition and contrast between your lit areas and the terminator shadow/core shadow areas are probably a bit too abrupt and contrasty. The falloff in light output from a muzzle flash is quite low because it is so bright in the instance it is firing but you could still probably add more of a blended value transition. The human especially looks tpo washed out with no shadowing.
From a realism point of view that muzzle flash is more like a flamethrower and it's so bright it's drawing too much focus....if it's supposed to be that's fine, but I would say use ref of an assault rifle on what muzzle flash actually looks like and what colour it is.

Perspective on the alien's second mouth isn't quite right, and I'd like to see a bit more how it's body connects up perhaps because at the moment it is mostly disembodied hands and tail and head. The purple in the background is way too saturated, so I'd tone it down to draw focus to where is't suppose to be. For the most part, I'd really focus mostly on values. Use black on a colour layer over top or an adjustment layer to check your values, as you only have one layer at the moment, and that is foreground.