Low Fantasy Woman

[calicojack]

Looking for help, or critiques with this painting!
The bird was based on a mixture of a falcon and a fox.
Any help appreciated!

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hello! I did a quick paintover for you:



You would benefit from studying some facial anatomy. Check out Loomis' Head and Hands and just comb through it like crazy, studying and drawing the heads from it.

Keep it up, though!

[calicojack]

Thanks so much! I think I fixed the structure of the face. How does it look? facial anatomy is something I definitely need to work on. I also revisited the lighting a little bit!

[Amit Dutta]

Heya, I can't really do a paintover but here are some general things I noticed about your piece and some things to consider.

1. Focus on and solve the major issues with the fundamentals first of all, always. Composition, Values (Depth and form), perspective, Anatomy, Lighting etc. The more you iron out issues before you get to detailing the less you will have to repaint. I think the composition is ok, but there might be a better one out there to be found just by doing some thumbnails. Did you do any?

2. Your forms don't have a consistent feel in volume and depth because you haven't really used values correctly to define their forms during construction. They often feel out of plane, or flat/cutout because of this. The hand and arm is a clear example of the forms blending into each other in space, because their values are so similar. I think you would benefit from doing lots of value studies of primitive forms and lighting conditions. Do studies with desaturated photographs or straight from life.

3. You are using hard edges almost everywhere. A skilled painting is done with a balance and interplay between the hard and soft edges to pull focus to specifically intended areas. Hard edges draw attention, so perhaps use them mostly at focal areas or to really nail down a silhouette.

4. You have jumped to using phototextures way too soon in my opinion. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using them to add detail, but there is a lot of understanding of fundamentals that need to be there in order to use and integrate them well. I would say for your case you should focus on doing painted studies of the various materials and then paint them in yourself. You will see a lot of concept artists using photos, and that's mostly because of time constraints but you can be damn sure they could paint it from scratch from an understanding of fundamentals if they wanted. Don't jump the gun and expect the photos to do the work for you.

5. I think the lighting was better in the first image, though to begin with there was quite a lot of inconsistency in your lighting scheme. The sun is behind the scene, so most things would be backlit and you would expect cast shadows coming towards the viewer, but then what is the strong light source on her face (which one would expect to be mostly in shadow) and which seems to be coming from the front of canvas?. The bird should be casting a shadow on her, her arm onto her body, the trees and hills onto the ground etc. You have attempted to show this, but once again I think that fundamentally understanding lighting simple objects will help you figure out what to do when the scene becomes more complex. Be careful of using dodge and burn too much to do all the lighting effects in your scene. It is very noticeable and creates a very blurry overly contrasted effect. You can use it for sure, but again it has to be used with an understanding of what the tools do exactly.

6. Use Reference. Did you use reference for the lighting conditions, the foxhawk thing, the forest and hills? Using reference helps with painting anything because it gives you something to aim for if you don't know or haven't painted something similar before.

That's a bit to think about. Most of it is technical, but I think your work would really improve tenfold with just a few hours of study on some fundamentals regularly.
Hope that helps