I'm looking for some feed back on project i did for design class.The assignment for for a weapon and i went with a magical tome . this was the second iteration .i like the lighting and the depth of the illustration, however i feel its lacking the polish i want.i work about 6 hours and a bit more on this through both iterations and it gets better every time. any suggestion to get a more readable form or anything at all i missed would be appreciated. i ill be resubmitting it after revisions . this will eventually be models and created in 3ds max.
I like the initial design, but there's a couple of things that seem to be missing. It looks like a book that needs to be unlocked, but I don't see anything that screams "keyhole" or "mechanism" to me. Also, it looks pretty clean for a book belonging to a Blood King, where's the blood?
Minor notes, it looks like there's maybe a little much negative space directly under the skull, and I'd like to see a little more flow to the side view of the ribs; the straight horizontal lines have a tendency to flatten things out, and it'd be nice to see some kind of stylized connective tissue or something in between the ribs, and maybe a little more curve to the ribs. I'd really like to see a back view, but that's just because I'm imagining this book sitting on a stand that looks like a spine, and I'd like to see how that connects.
As far as technique stuff is concerned, the only things that really stand out to me are these: The spike just to the left of the center one in the front image looks recessed, just due to lack of highlights pushing it out. The other thing is that there are some lighting issues: while you have two direct sources of light (the blueish gray from above, and red from below) the shadows don't match directly under the skull, and with what looks like a highly reflective material being used for the skull and ribs, there should be a lot of bounced light, of which there seems to be very little currently. I would also pull back some on the reds in the recessed part of the book below the skull, I wouldn't think that the bottom edges of those pieces would catch the light very much, especially the edges down towards the bottom.
All in all it's a good start, look forward to seeing the finished product!
Think about the silhouette next time the book is almost a square when it should be more rectangular in logic.One thing that need to be understand for better thumnail is depth if you want to present something it better to not only use front and profile but to mix them together
