Siren on a Cliff

[Saraiza]

soooo
I tried to make a good lighting scene, like described in the Gurney book: last light of the day, only the upper parts of objects are in the light.

I have problems with the cliff, it doesn't really look like stone. I also have no idea what to do with the sky. And the whole Siren seems a little flat, too.
Feedback and Critique of any kind is appreciated!

( I made the Siren blind because I thought it would be cool if they use bat-like vision. You know, making highpitched sounds and see through the soundreflections. Also I made little creepy touches to her, since, you know, they sing so that ships crash on the mountains. They are more monsters than pretty womans.)



:)

[Flo]

Hi Saraiza

I did a quick overpaint of your piece.



when you have the feeling something is flat, thats probably because the values are too much in the same area (mostly grey for example). you can check your values by putting a black layer on top of everything and turn the layer style to "saturation". after that add an adjustment layer "levels" and have a look.

I really like the design of the mask-thing, allthough I wasnt really sure what it is. maybe you should attach it more to the face if you wanna make it look grown out of the skin.

for painting skin, you should maybe use a softer brush. I evened it a bit out to make it look smoother. then it is not clear where the light is coming from. you have a sunset in the background but a stream of yellow light from the right. I didnt know if that was intentional so I didnt change it, but it looks a bit weird to me. also here right leg is not working the way you pictured it. you should draw through the figure and work with simple shapes first in order to arrange the limbs correctly. then the perspective is kinda weird: the horizon is very low which usually means that the beholder is low too. but we can see on top of the stone where the siren chills out. that makes it look as if the siren is sitting on an tilted surface. other than that there are some anatomy issues but I am not too fit in anatomy myself so I dont want to say something wrong. :) It seems like you jumped to the details a bit too early.

overall I like the mood of your picture and the composition.

keep it up, you can make this really cool with a little more work.

cheers,
flo