Here's the quickie paintover:
And here's the PSD so you can toggle my paintover off and on to see exactly what I changed
jademk2-RobEdit.psd (Size: 892.3 KB / Downloads: 50)
The main issues were:
-The self-illuminating staff should look like it's brighter in the center to appear like it's really glowing.
-The green light from the staff is reaching areas it shouldn't, as well as not reaching areas it should.
And this leads me to the recurring thought I've had whenever I saw you posting new works in the past several years.
I've known your work since the early days at cgsociety, and over the years I've seen you continue to post new works at FB. I think it's great you have continued to work hard and produce new works, but what I'm also noticing is that you have some glaring holes in your foundational knowledge, and this shows up in your work consistently. We all have our weaknesses and blind spots and I certainly have mine. I mean, even Craig Mullins thinks he has them. Often it's far easier to notice it in others than in our own work, especially when our weaknesses and strengths don't completely overlap.
The things I have noticed are mainly:
-The lack of thorough understanding of how lighting works. It seems you have picked up some knowledge over the years, but it's not complete and this must be addressed in your next phase of artistic development. This is especially true for the type of work you do, which requires rendering of fictional scenes and characters in a relatively realistic style. Without enough fidelity, the work will lack the persuasive quality it needs. To fix this problem, you need to do a ton of lighting studies of different subjects and environments. Take tons of photo references of different lighting on different subjects/environments and analyze them, do studies from them. Go through your favorite movies and take screenshots, look at your favorite photographer's works, experiment with the lights in your home and take reference photos. Really focus on how cast shadows and form shadows work, how diffused and specular highlights work, how ambient bounced light works, how to cast shadows in perspective accurately, etc.
-Not enough fidelity in the depiction of different surface properties. I highly recommend you do the different materials sphere studies. You probably have seen them before, and maybe even attempted them yourself, but if not, put this on your to-do list. Also do a ton of still life studies of objects with different surface properties--wood, plastic, brass, stainless steel, glass, rubber, fruits, meat, skin, plaster--anything and everything.
-Anatomy/figure needs more work. You have studied this enough to not have glaringly egregious problems in your work, however, often your figures have this awkward look to them, lacking naturalistic presence. Areas where you used or didn't use references will have dramatic differences in fidelity, making your work inconsistent. I suggest you set a target stylistic parameter and then stick to it and do everything you can to keep it consistent. For example, if you want a realistic/believable look, then you MUST always use reference, without exceptions, because using good references is the bedrock of that style of illustration. You also must know your anatomy inside out and do tons of figure and portrait studies so you become extremely familiar with how people actually look in reality, not just in your stylized imagination. Even if you are aiming for a stylized look, you still have to do all that because the foundation of any stylization is reality, because that is what any style is based on. If you don't have a firm understanding of reality, you won't be able to effectively simplify, idealize, and exaggerate from that reality into a targeted stylistic look.
-Artistic sensibility. The awkwardness I mentioned might be seen in different aspects of your work, but there's also the overall sensibility of how you manage your values, your color palettes, your edges, your brushwork, how you selective detail, etc. We are all culminations of our influences, combined with our own creative impulses. One of the best ways to assimilate qualities from your influences is to do master studies, where you copy their work and try to walk in their shoes--how they manage values, how they deal with edges, the color palettes they use, how they simplify or exaggerate forms, their brushwork, how they handle lighting and surface properties, etc. This is a time-honored tradition that artists have been following for as long as art has existed. I don't know who your artistic heroes are, and only you know what qualities you want to take from their influence and infuse into your own work. Advanced artists might be able to simply use their intellect and analyze the works of those they admire and then execute works that contain those qualities, but for less developed artists, master copies is the most effective way. And usually for advanced artists, master copies remain the most direct and effect way to assimilate influences.
You have a lot of drive and I think if you create a more effective artistic development strategy with a targeted practice/study routine, you will see dramatic improvement in the next few years, to the point that you might even feel like you want to only keep the newer works in your portfolio and delete the rest. Where you are now, is a level that I think of as advanced-intermediate, where you have been stuck on a plateau for many years and can no longer advance forward into the advanced level. If you make the effort to develop in the areas I mentioned, I'm pretty confident you can break through onto the advanced level. I say this because I've seen this over and over in the artists I taught over the last 13 years, as well as in the artists I see on the Internet in general. Those who have kept their older works on the Internet, you can clearly see where they were stuck on a plateau with similar problems like the ones I see in your work, and then something changes and you see their work start to advance in fidelity and persuasiveness, as well as overall artistic sensibility, and the changes are usually in the areas I mentioned.
I know this is a lot to take in, but I've wanted to tell you this for years and hopefully it'll be helpful for the next phase of your artistic development.
I have my own demons to slay, and all these portraits I've done in the last few years is my process of getting there, as that's the one area I really wanted to get better at. I'm not there yet, but it's as much about the journey as it is about the destination--and some might even say it's all about the journey and the destination is but a byproduct of the journey itself.
