03-03-2023, 05:49 AM
Dude, you're absurdly prolific! Awesome stuff!
So, if I may build upon darktiste's spot-on critique, to get more delicate hands you need to work on the fingers shape and shadows.
Their shapes are too cylindrical, while I get the sense you were going for a more lean look... and lean fingers are weird crooked twigs. There's not one shaped like another, and you'll have features like the knuckles being slightly fuller than the body of the fingers. A trick many use for knuckles is to shade them slightly darker and pinkish instead of rendering individual wrinkles, so they're still suggested but softer-looking. You're shading the nails a bit too harshly too, and they sit perfectly on the surface of the fingers while they should squish them a bit, making some of the fingertips also wider than the body.
Turned fingers won't have round tips, in this type of hand the center of the digits protrude a bit. I happen to have hands of similar build (but bony!) and skin tone, so here are a few ref pics (please don't mind the nails, my care is limited to filing them as they get too uneven :x ):
I've applied a photoshop filter on the right to simplify the images. See how it's the skin on the root of the nails that gets more colored and darker, not the inner shape of the nail? The skin is very thin there, it can't catch many top highlights and they're very subtle, reflection-like, not lit vs shadowed area like. And the shadows on the fingers are soft because there's a lot of subsurface scattering going on, which is missing on Helen's hands.
It'd make her hands more like this, with less defined edges and hues marking the switch to different parts of the hands rather than deep shadows:
That's it. Keep up the good work, and I loved her facial structure, it's very cute.
So, if I may build upon darktiste's spot-on critique, to get more delicate hands you need to work on the fingers shape and shadows.
Their shapes are too cylindrical, while I get the sense you were going for a more lean look... and lean fingers are weird crooked twigs. There's not one shaped like another, and you'll have features like the knuckles being slightly fuller than the body of the fingers. A trick many use for knuckles is to shade them slightly darker and pinkish instead of rendering individual wrinkles, so they're still suggested but softer-looking. You're shading the nails a bit too harshly too, and they sit perfectly on the surface of the fingers while they should squish them a bit, making some of the fingertips also wider than the body.
Turned fingers won't have round tips, in this type of hand the center of the digits protrude a bit. I happen to have hands of similar build (but bony!) and skin tone, so here are a few ref pics (please don't mind the nails, my care is limited to filing them as they get too uneven :x ):
I've applied a photoshop filter on the right to simplify the images. See how it's the skin on the root of the nails that gets more colored and darker, not the inner shape of the nail? The skin is very thin there, it can't catch many top highlights and they're very subtle, reflection-like, not lit vs shadowed area like. And the shadows on the fingers are soft because there's a lot of subsurface scattering going on, which is missing on Helen's hands.
It'd make her hands more like this, with less defined edges and hues marking the switch to different parts of the hands rather than deep shadows:
That's it. Keep up the good work, and I loved her facial structure, it's very cute.