Feedback on Art?

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16 comments, last by Animate2D 11 years, 6 months ago
I am not a fan of the first two, they seem childish and almost half done. The blizzard fanart is nice for lineart but it lacks some finer details. Are you practicing your coloring? Something I have found in my own journey is the use of photoshop and speed art. I use to think such things were silly and pointless but they can seriously help you to learn the tech that make up the good art. I would also strongly encourage you to ensure you look up anatomy and lighting. These are the two most common rookie mistakes. You can have all the design and concept you want but if your fundamental understanding of those two things is lacking it will show in your art. Good luck and keep at it.
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You wanted feedback from a game point of view, so here is mine. When you are doing concept art for a video game, you need to keep a few things in mind. First, if it's character designs or environment designs, eventually somebody will have to come along behind you and realize your sketches as concrete assets. In order to help them in this, you should try to practice your skills at providing them what they need. Some front and side sketches, for example, in a relatively neutral pose, as well as some sketches of them in action so the modeler can see where the lines and bends should flow. The samurai is a good start, but the crouched pose of Wolverine and the... sexy?... pose of the porn elf mean that in order to get a good read on the character, the modeler is going to need a few more sketches.

Second, color and shading are important. Line art is great to start with, but the modeler will need more to give him a better sense of the form and shape he needs to recreate. Again, of the three, the samurai is the best one here. You could just about set that guy as a background and start pushing verts around, although the darks are a bit too dark to really get a sense of the shape.

This becomes even more important when you are doing other than human-ish characters, as then the only reference the modeler will have to see the form of the character will be your sketches. With the porn elf, the modeler could just grab some random porn elf reference off the web and tweak to suit, but when the time comes to do beasts and animals, demons and ghouls, then he will need you to give him good references.

Lastly, and I know this really doesn't need to be said, but you need more. More sketches, more concepts, more, more, more. A good hiring manager will be looking for someone who can do work to spec, rapidly and efficiently. Someone who can work quickly, rather than agonizing over each individual sketch. You need a good, instinctive understanding of anatomy (both human and animal) in order to do this effectively. If you are always tweaking and fiddling with your anatomy, trying to get this or that proportion just right, then you need to practice more. Throughout the course of development, you will probably sketch the same character a dozen times, maybe more for main characters. At a certain point, it stops being a creative exercise and becomes instead a technical one, and so you need to be able to do the work even when you aren't artistically inspired and floating on cloud nine by the wonderful vision you are setting down on paper. If you can still do a quality and informative sketch of a character after you have already sketched him in 15 different iterations and can no longer stand to even look at him without throwing up in your mouth a little, then you'll do okay.

<snip> Draw more! </snip>

This. VERY MUCH this.

Blunt-force-trauma level honesty approaching:

I'm surprised you applied to any company with the portfolio you have. Are you an art student? Did you ever get a portfolio review done of your work?

I'm assuming your portfolio material is mostly what you have posted on deviantart, so correct me if I'm wrong.

All your pieces are single characters, mostly fanart, mostly black and white pen drawings floating on a blank page. That isn't going to cut it. You do want to tailor the portfolio you send to the job you're applying for, but I can't imagine any company paying money for your work as it stands. Here's the deal:

Do a LOT more practice: life studies, anatomy studies, gesture drawings, detail studies, boring tedious practice stuff, stuff you're never going to show anyone because it's not about getting pageviews but about making your art better.

Start pushing yourself outside of the single-character-mostly-on-the-page template. I saw one, maybe two life drawings when I scanned your gallery. Start churning those things out. Life drawing is great, it forces you to look at a 3 dimensional figure in space and capture those elements that make them more believable on the page.

Start trying other content and media. Paint something. Paint a bunch of somethings. Look into color theory. Throw together some perspective-based environment sketches. Draw a hundred control panels (something I'm doing right now: practicing my techy prop design). Fill entire pages with thumbnail sketches and sillhouettes of characters. Utilize resources out there that force you to complete 30-second gesture drawings. Do more with your talent. You have it, but it's stuck in this tiny little realm of character-based fan art, and it shows because the few times you branch out, it looks more amateur than your other stuff. (The life drawing was actually pretty good, though, I can't say it's all bad).

Start scanning your work instead of taking a photo.

Stop applying to Blizzard. Seriously. You're not at that level. Save yourself the hassle. And save their art director the hassle.

If you're not a member of either, sign up at conceptart.org and Satellite Soda. The former is chock-full of artists pushing themselves every day. Just browse the Sketchbooks forum to see what some people do to keep progressing their skill. The latter is full of blunt honest criticism and an insanely talented crew of artists in industry jobs as well as amateurs looking for said scathing criticism.

You're not bad, but it's not polished or professional-level.

Hazard Pay :: FPS/RTS in SharpDX (gathering dust, retained for... historical purposes)
DeviantArt :: Because right-brain needs love too (also pretty neglected these days)

[sub]I like your style. You have an interesting imagination. I expect that you will continue to grow and reach your goals. The positive attitude to look for suggestions and criticism of your work is very commendable and you will go far with it. smile.png [/sub]

[sub]Focusing on very refined final works and making the anotomical proportions more exact would increase the probability of acceptance of your works. The shoulders on the first three images need correction, for example. It is perfectly fine to use a real life model image as a guide in your character making for the proportions. Try creating absolutely unique but captivating characters. Some of the major features of your characters are similar to well known ones which already exist.[/sub]

[sub] Companies are looking for very unique works of art for their games, so you need to show them a strong pattern of creating original character concepts. [/sub]

[sub]This advice is coming from my being two years as semi-professional 2D and 3D artist putting content into games.[/sub]


[sub]Keep them coming! You are making wonderful progress! biggrin.png [/sub]


[sub]Clinton[/sub]

Personal life and your private thoughts always effect your career. Research is the intellectual backbone of game development and the first order. Version Control is crucial for full management of applications and software. The better the workflow pipeline, then the greater the potential output for a quality game. Completing projects is the last but finest order.

by Clinton, 3Ddreamer

the image i am going to post next is of a Viera PLEASE don't think i made her half naked on purpose, it's kind of the way they dress in FF 12 which is the version i am going to be using, i did think that she was a little too skimpy so i gave her some armor i liked which i borrowed from assassin's creed. once i feel more confident i will post my original works. but thanks for the feed back, i think i will make a section in my drawings for P-elves. (just kidding)
alright here she is Viera's Creed. on your mark, get set, go!
Oh! Nice contrasts between the femininity and the warrior duty which are almost opposites in spirit but necessarily combined in the character. Another contrast between youth and combat is interesting. Good that you correctly perceived the lower jaw line on her left side of the face. Because her head is slightly turned, her right cheek obscurs the right lower jaw bone line. This is correct and shows that you are ready for any such perception and perspective challenges. Areas of dense detail may receive clarity by contrasting the elements with texture, hue, shading, and so forth, which has me curious how you will interpret them.cool.png

Clinton

Personal life and your private thoughts always effect your career. Research is the intellectual backbone of game development and the first order. Version Control is crucial for full management of applications and software. The better the workflow pipeline, then the greater the potential output for a quality game. Completing projects is the last but finest order.

by Clinton, 3Ddreamer

Looks good to me. Keep up the good work.

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