Quote:Original post by LockePick
Overall looks pretty good. Nothing major stands out as a big problem. So that means... nitpicking time! [grin] Really these are just general tips more than critiques on these works.
General tips are far more useful, thanks! I'm probably not going to go back and change these four; I'll try to correct whatever mistakes I've made in the next one.
Quote:Shading protip #1 - Pretty much everyone, when they first go to shade something, just grabs the base material colour and then "adds black" or "lowers brightness". Because shadows are black, right? Well, not really. Shadows are lights not hitting the object, which means the dominant ambient light in the scene is going to take over.
Yeah, I pretty much just took the CYMK, added extra K. Or just picked the next darkest colour from the palette. I'll try to keep this in mind; sometimes I do hand-pick the darker tone, but it's still pretty much the same hue and saturation.
Quote:Shading protip #2 - Keep in mind the properties of the material you are dealing with. Skin looks good with rimlighting because of the way light passes through it. Also a teensy bit of red in the skin shadows tends to make it feel more lifelike. Additionally, skin/hair/anything soft and translucent looks good with lighter shadows in general as it's letting light through.
Everything looks a bit like it's made of plastic, doesn't it? That's a good point. I've been trying to keep the number of colours I use down to a minimum for my characters because I like the whole minimalist look, but I'll pay attention to which colours look best.
Quote:Shading protip #3 - Be more consistent, foo. The shadows on Samus are pretty random, not showing up on certain parts of her, not following the same light source direction, and the highlights aren't really facing the same direction either. Link's skin isn't shaded at all, neither are his eyebrows even though the hair right next to them is, neither is his ocarina.
(This applies to all the shading tips:) My shading frankly has been pretty crap; up until this week I've mostly been using shading purely to show that something has a third dimension and only vaguely paying attention to light sources. It wasn't until this weeks Final Fantasy image that I tried visualising where the light source was with respect to Cloud and designing the shading to compensate.
Quote:Vector protip - No excuse for round objects not being perfectly round. See: Samus' shoulder/elbow/gun connection. That round bit on the elbow should be wrapping around the cylinder. Unless the gun is supposed to rotate around it, in which case it should be spherical.
That depiction of Samus is a little bit screwed up all round. I learnt a little bit too late that it's hard to draw an action pose for a chibi-dimensioned Samus; she's all helmet and shoulder pad and looks frankly quite ridiculous. I spent a little too long on making a snazzy Metroid Prime logo and not enough time actually working on the character
Quote:Obsessive Compulsive balance protip - In the first two pictures my eye travels from the left (human interest trumps all) up through the title to the top right (increased detail/contrast pulls focus) and then crashes down and gets stuck on the blank bottom right corners. Evening out the detail level just a tiny bit would help, like Navi usually leaves glowing trails and there could be a ship faded a little in the fzero background.
That one is super OCD grasping at straws nitpick though.
No, no, you're quite right; that's something I spotted myself and it really bugs me that it's bugging you [smile]. Both of those images need something in that corner, and I knew that at the time, but at the time I was too sick of adding in extra detail that I just wanted to finish the damn thing.
One of the biggest problems I know I need to work which doesn't show up in images is my speed of drawing. I suspect I'm spending too long worrying about fiddly little details that don't really matter that much and then ignoring the larger gaping problems. You can spend hours with vector art just playing around with individual nodes rather than just leaving something be, and no-one probably is going to notice, for example, those tiny little feet you've shaped into the glyphs of the "TRAPPERS" font on the logo, so you might as well just throw them in instead of agonising over it.
Thanks for the tips though; I'll keep them in mind for next weeks' image (I still need to select the game...)
These are all vector art pieces completed in Inkscape.
Since this is being done as a learning exercise, I'm happy for all constructive criticism so I can work on improvements in style with next week's header image. Thanks for viewing and for in advance all help provided!
