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TakeTWO

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Idea I had for a story: what if you died and were sent back a few years into the past with the knowledge that you are destined to die at that specific date in the future? What would you do to make your mark with the limited time you have? and how would you navigate around knowing people who haven't met you yet? What an isolating experience that must be, I thought.


I thought it'd be a cool gimmick to have a film motif for this one, with memories being represented through film reels, maybe it would be an interesting idea for the character to be an amateur filmmaker trying to capture as much as he can before his TakeTWO expires?


Sources for the public-domain photographs used in the background:

Skull [Used as reference]: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=57173&picture=skull

Fire: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=315899&picture=fire-flames-embers-lava

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I really appreciate that you're trying to branch out a little more with your style! I will admit that your last few pieces before this had felt very similar. Even though that might have been the intent I feel like it started to have a negative impact after a while. Don't get me wrong though they were all extremely cool, just felt a little samey you know?

Anyway I do have some feedback for this one, but take my feedback with a grain of salt since I'm not super informed on how art actually works and the theory behind it and such.

If you don't wanna take my feedback at all then feel free to completely ignore this, especially if the things I touch on in this are things you were completely aware of

I very much appreciate the amount of detail that went into all of the gray sections of the piece, especially the memories and the skull! Although I can't help but feel like all the gray sections blend into each other a little bit since it all feels so close to the same shade. This isn't necessarily that bad of course, but it's just a tiny nitpick. Especially since it was really easy to tell where certain things started and others ended in your previous artworks

Granted that was because you used more colors but I feel like you still had plenty of grays to choose from to avoid that in this piece

However my biggest issue is that it seems like it doesn't stick to one style, what I mean is it just feels kinda incoherent because each section feels like it would be from its own artwork style.

I think this because:

The colored background looks very smooth and blurry, the character at the top is very rough, the characters on the left look clean and sharp, and finally the skull looks very realistic

I don't know if this is perfectly fine to do in an art piece, but it does leave it feeling unbalanced to me.

I feel like pieces you make in the future in this style may benefit from:

1. Using more different shades of grays in like empty areas or something, not filling in those areas with something new but just to break up the big areas of the same color

2. Using the same style throughout, so that it could be more coherent and cohesive

Overall though, despite these issues that I see in this the concept is still very unique and the actual art itself and the ideas you use in it are VERY cool!

I hope this was useful :)

Update: just noticed that you made changes to this, this looks fantastic now! It feels way more unified!

SunSmog responds:

Thank you for your response, I appreciate that you've gone through the effort of writing a comment this thoughtful! I guess my recent pieces have been rather samey as most of them are just entries of a series of illustrations all tackling the same story idea, initially this idea of making multiple drawings to explore visual ideas related to a story idea began with my "Hot Pink Blues" series of drawings, however with that it was spread out over several months. My more recent series of drawings "MAINFRAME" was all drawn within almost a single week. I think maybe not taking breaks probably led to some homogeneity as I didn't give myself time to dwell on ideas and instead just made things up on the fly.

I agree with your critique regarding the background of the fire and the skull not really clashing well with the style of the rest of the piece, it would've been a lot better if I had just drawn it rather than using public domain photos (or maybe I should've made the backgrounds also black and white?), so I'll keep that in mind next time. The shades of grey criticism is also good, I'll be sure to be careful when it comes to that.

The character on the top is supposed to be some otherworldly cosmic being so the art style difference on him makes sense, but with everything else, you're completely right. Thank you for bringing this all to my attention, I will try my best to mitigate issues such as these next time. 👍


update: just made a few changes to the piece based on your feedback

Credits & Info

Artist
Views
105
Faves:
5
Votes
18
Score
4.69 / 5.00

Uploaded
Oct 3, 2023
8:41 PM EDT
Category
Fine Art

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