02-27-2024, 11:16 AM
A very quick paintover focusing mostly on your lighting scheme. Your image feels flat because much of it exhibits the same level of contrast between the light and shadow of the forms, at every depth in the picture. Closer things would tend to exhibit more contrast, further things less, as a general rule. Doing this would aid in a sense of depth.
Also important however is the pattern of light and dark (notan or chiaroscuro) overall in the image. These are shapes that determine the compositional effect within the image. In the paintover, by simply choosing a slightly more directional light source allows patterns of shadow and light to be designed to suggest more obvious focal points, like the girl, but to also push back sections of the snake body into shadow and create compositional patterns with the lit parts. The lighting scheme should always be chosen with intent, to make the image more powerful or effective.
The amount of light falloff (how it reduces in power the further one gets from a light source) also helps to suggest a more realistic lighting scene. This may not be what you are going for stylistically, but learning about and paying attention to light falloff will help make things a bit more realistic and/or dimensional. Best way to study and improve that is to do still life studies from life.
Another thing that breaks the depth somewhat is the way the snake wraps around the column. The way you have drawn the twist in the tail really breaks the perspective/depth of the column
. I tried to fix it a bit with the lighting, but it will need to be redrawn correctly.
There are many problems with the figure, that I don't want to go into, but suffice to say, the pose is most important to the action you are trying to convey, to a greater extent than even the facial expression. The pose looks extremely awkward twisted backwards like that. Using reference is highly recommended as the figure is very difficult to draw well from imagination without a sh1t ton of practice. If you can't find good photo reference, shoot some of yourself or a friend doing the pose. This will instantly solve many issues. I would also highly recommend going to real life drawing classes/sessions and studying figures also from photos. But the biggest bang for your buck will be from life.
Hope that helps.
.jpg "Filename: Project (20240227014656).jpg
Size: 1.93 MB02-27-2024, 10:59 AM")
Also important however is the pattern of light and dark (notan or chiaroscuro) overall in the image. These are shapes that determine the compositional effect within the image. In the paintover, by simply choosing a slightly more directional light source allows patterns of shadow and light to be designed to suggest more obvious focal points, like the girl, but to also push back sections of the snake body into shadow and create compositional patterns with the lit parts. The lighting scheme should always be chosen with intent, to make the image more powerful or effective.
The amount of light falloff (how it reduces in power the further one gets from a light source) also helps to suggest a more realistic lighting scene. This may not be what you are going for stylistically, but learning about and paying attention to light falloff will help make things a bit more realistic and/or dimensional. Best way to study and improve that is to do still life studies from life.
Another thing that breaks the depth somewhat is the way the snake wraps around the column. The way you have drawn the twist in the tail really breaks the perspective/depth of the column
. I tried to fix it a bit with the lighting, but it will need to be redrawn correctly.
There are many problems with the figure, that I don't want to go into, but suffice to say, the pose is most important to the action you are trying to convey, to a greater extent than even the facial expression. The pose looks extremely awkward twisted backwards like that. Using reference is highly recommended as the figure is very difficult to draw well from imagination without a sh1t ton of practice. If you can't find good photo reference, shoot some of yourself or a friend doing the pose. This will instantly solve many issues. I would also highly recommend going to real life drawing classes/sessions and studying figures also from photos. But the biggest bang for your buck will be from life.
Hope that helps.