New to the portal

[Opkluu]

Well, I've been on Newgrounds for quite a while, just watching videos, and playing games. Then, I found that there were two other portals, and started to wander the audio portal, finding awesome techno music. So, finally, I decided to check out the art portal, and liked it too! I've been on another art website, deviantart, for a couple years, and what I really like about this forum, is that people actually give critical analysis's of other's art, while on dA, they just comment with a "Nice!" or "Awesome!" and don't really do much, but give you a fave. So, I'm saying hello to all you awesome artists out there, and would like to show my first piece on this site here for some critical analysis. Anything that could help me improve, especially specifics would be awesome.

So, without farther ado, here is my latest piece... "Pestilenial Torrent"

Higher Rez here at DA: http://opkluu.deviantart.com/#/d3w1hg0

[J-qb]

At 7/17/11 11:39 PM, Opkluu wrote: So, without farther ado, here is my latest piece... "Pestilenial Torrent"

That looks really good, I do have a couple of issues though;
The offset silhouettes of the dragon for me take away from the piece, they distract attention from the dragon and make the piece a bit messy; I think it would have been better to just have the background withouth the silhouettes.
Square canvasses tend to get boring; they oftentimes make your composition really static and generally uninteresting, so I'd try to stay away from them.
There seem to be some anatomy issues with the otherwise very cool dragon; His upper arms are really short (especially his right one), but the main issue I have is with the wings. First of all having wing flaps on top of his wings seems odd to me, I'd say they'd give more windage if anything. The bigger problem with the wings though is the positioning of muscles etc; it looks more like a tree branch than anything else. I understand that it's difficult to get references or anatomy examples for a creature you made up yourself, but you could try piecing it together from parts of animals; i.e. you could use the wings of a bat or pterosaur and legs of a monitor lizard.
Good work though, great linework and shading.

[Opkluu]

At 7/18/11 06:36 AM, J-qb wrote:

At 7/17/11 11:39 PM, Opkluu wrote: So, without farther ado, here is my latest piece... "Pestilenial Torrent"

That looks really good, I do have a couple of issues though;
The offset silhouettes of the dragon for me take away from the piece, they distract attention from the dragon and make the piece a bit messy; I think it would have been better to just have the background withouth the silhouettes.
Square canvasses tend to get boring; they oftentimes make your composition really static and generally uninteresting, so I'd try to stay away from them.
There seem to be some anatomy issues with the otherwise very cool dragon; His upper arms are really short (especially his right one), but the main issue I have is with the wings. First of all having wing flaps on top of his wings seems odd to me, I'd say they'd give more windage if anything. The bigger problem with the wings though is the positioning of muscles etc; it looks more like a tree branch than anything else. I understand that it's difficult to get references or anatomy examples for a creature you made up yourself, but you could try piecing it together from parts of animals; i.e. you could use the wings of a bat or pterosaur and legs of a monitor lizard.
Good work though, great linework and shading.

For the silhouette, I think it actually brings the eye from the top right, which is the brightest location, down, diagonally over the piece, to the shilouette, but I guess it could be different between people. The square canvas thing is very interesting, I've never thought of using a different shape canvas... but do you mean as the actual canvas being shaped differently? Or just a background that alters the shape of the canvas. I really don't consider myself "good" in anatomy, I just pretty much made up all those muscles and things... so, thanks for your view of that, flaps on top of wings would catch more air though, and provide more lift, etc, etc, bat wings seem to be the best source of inspiration, so I'll be sure to do a study on that. Thanks for the analysis!

[Re2deemer]

Welcome. Welcome to Cit--....wait, no. Welcome to the forum.

At 7/18/11 12:27 PM, Opkluu wrote:
For the silhouette, I think it actually brings the eye from the top right, which is the brightest location, down, diagonally over the piece, to the shilouette, but I guess it could be different between people.

Here, I grayscaled your image to see the values better and downsized it so that one would not be distracted by the details (This video demonstrates why the latter is useful).
Notice how the added green silhouette is chewing into the dragon's silhouette? Recognizable silhouettes are very important and currently the green silhouette is creating so much noise that it's hard to "read" the dragon itself. That is especially because the green extra silhouette is brighter than both the dark background and the shaded dragon skin, two areas it is contact with. Contrast attracts the eye and currently, you don't want that to happen.
Personally, I don't even think there really was any need to bring the viewer's eye back. Bcause you're bringing it back from....what? A large blot of bright paint while they have this more detailed (and thus more interesting) thing in the left edge and the wing's lines guiding the eye there anyway.

Otherwise, I'm quite enjoying this piece. It has movement, it has a pleasing colour scheme and unlike J-Qb, I'm completely okay with square canvases. They don't stop the composition within from being good.

Also...when you're bugged by DA's comments then just do one simple thing - ask them "why?". "What do you like about it?". "What doesn't work here?".

On a side note....that guy whose video I linked there? I warmly suggest you take a look at all his videos, they are quite awesome.

[Opkluu]

At 7/18/11 12:56 PM, Re2deemer wrote:

Here, I grayscaled your image to see the values better and downsized it so that one would not be distracted by the details (This video demonstrates why the latter is useful).
Notice how the added green silhouette is chewing into the dragon's silhouette? Recognizable silhouettes are very important and currently the green silhouette is creating so much noise that it's hard to "read" the dragon itself.

Thanks for everything, I guess I can see now how it makes the image "pop" less, when its grey scaled. I'll take that into consideration for my next pieces.

Also, thanks for the video, I'll be sure to watch them all ^^