[Shanx]

Erm, first post in my own thread...

I have been learning slowly on this forum, and trying to paint by copying styles I see here and stuff...

I thought I would post this and see if I could some comments/critisism (sp?) on this painting...

I need to work on the background a little more... but I always have a hard time trying to paint something decent there... I concentrate on just the character too much... but anyway...

Please tell me where I am going wrong...

[Francis]

Hi Shanx

It's a pretty good painting - there are some cool things going on, and I think I understand what you are going for.

I have a few crits on color and composition. As you said, the background could use some love. The burning building is placed very tangent with the handgun - it's causing a bit of conflict. One solution I might suggest is to shrink the character a little bit, and let more of the canvas be devoted to the background/environment, and then you wouldn't be forced into trying to cram the cool background elements in with the figure.

With the colors, I think you've done a fairly good job delineating values, specular highlights, etc. The thing I notice (because I did the same thing at one point) is that the shadows are black or gray, and the highlights are white. In the face in particular, I think you could use a lot more color. I'm guessing it's a self portrait of sorts (?) - there is some nice attention paid to the eyes. White can be used for highlights, but I would suggest using them very sparingly. Indicate more lit areas by using the local color of the materials (i.e. the blue armor) rather than adding white.

The lighting is a little bit ambiguous - hard to tell if it is day or night. Figure out the colors in your lighting scheme, and keep them pretty simple at first. For example, I am guessing you added the bonfire to throw some neato warm rimlighting on his left side. With that in mind, I would probably make the principal front light on him cool, like he is being lit from above with a cool blue spotlight. Then you can really play the cold lights against some warm colored shadows in his face, with some hot red/orange rim lighting on his side.

It's a good piece, with some good ideas and a lot of potential to be a really cool piece. I would love to see another iteration if you are inclined.


edit:

quick sketch - this is mainly to show some color ideas. The composition isn't any better, and it's probably too saturated. I just wanted to throw down some color ideas because re-reading my stuff, it is a bit jumbled. There is very little white in the image, and the darks are actually very dark saturated colors (dunno if the jpg will preserve that...). Take with a grain of salt, I am still baffled by color daily.



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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Godwin]

/\ what he said

great pose, great concepts

make the colours warmer and more saturated, the blue on the soldier looks really washed out (along with the highlights), and u may want to work on removing those black (pen?) outlines, that should make the soldier merge more with the background
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Derelict Studios|Godwin's Space

[Shanx]

Francis : Wow, thank you for taking your time and effort to help me on this one Francis!

You are correct in saying that it is kinda a self portrait. It started off as a self portrait practice, but I decided to just paint something fun over it. My self portraits never look like me anyway.

I hear what you are saying, and I am going to have another crack at it today. I won't change this one, as I kinda want to try to do it right from scratch. I will compose and paint something with the end result in my head. I just let this one appear as I went along, which made it so un-co-ordinated.

I need to learn some decent colour theory stuff, but haven't found anywhere online with something I can understand. I never studied any of this, and it is all a learning process to me

But anyway, I'm babbling!

Thank you very much (and you too Godwin).