[Lean Bean McQueen]

Just a couple pieces.

[sometimes]

what? still no replies? I think the first one is killer.
Well.. second one not my style, though I like the flying knight in there.
happy 2009, later

[Sampster]

Hey Lean, that's kind of the nature of this forum man. I post stuff all the time and don't get replies, and see people post better stuff than this that sinks to the bottom of the forum without any feedback. A lot of people don't have time.

Technically speaking I think both have obvious issues but they also kind of made me smile because they're a little crazy so I guess that's worth something. With the top one everything follows that arc and I can't tell if that's supposed to be a motion path for one guy or a whole squad of people diving out.
The second one... I think the biggest issue is that your mans right foot looks like it's pushing off and pivoting the whole body but his foot isn't actually touching anything and he's swinging.

Keep practicing though, producing these finished pieces will make you that much better.

[Lean Bean McQueen]

Thank you for the feedbacks sometime and Sampster.

For sure I'll keep on practicing.

[Petri.J]

[sometimes]

Interesting discussion.

Still though you gotta wonder how these forums came up in the first place? wasn't it really to tap eachother on the backs?
And now it really seems to have got out of hand, if you look at cgsociety and forums like that, what the hell? Realism can't get more than realism.
Somehow they are killing creativity....
Self criticism doesn't need a forum, or does it?

..and by the way this self criticism can really get of hand, haven't we artists tortured ourselves enough?

[Petri.J]

[sometimes]

improving with criticism can be discussed..
Because if you seek realism you are gonna criticise yourself for the lack of realism. Not sure what I am getting at but don't you think that everything has got ouf of hand of how most artworks are nowadays? look at those artcenter, not trying to point finger here but if technical means everything looks the same is it really worth it? is it a good tecnique to teach or to learn?
you can find critique teaching in the music industry aswell, creative should be the most important stage of them all. Even placed before technique.
nice conversating, gotta go to bed.
later

[sometimes]

sorry for hijacking your thread "Lean" with my nonsense rambling, will try keep it on the downlow again.
hasta luego

[Petri.J]

[sometimes]

Isn't to be "Creative" to be pushing the boundaries? Might be out on a limb though...
I'm gonna accept that we are not on the same page Petri, thanks for conversating.

Once you really can understand the abstract nature of things you realize what tecnique is doing to you and the way you create art. Didn't think of it that deep before, not gonna analyze it much further but I can now really put myself into the thinking of those Abstract newcomers, why they disapproved of tecnique. ....
Had not thought about it that way before, perhaps age can be positive in some ways. Damn I'm positive.

Lean, apologize once again.

[Affected]

I'll try to do some critique of the pictures here first:

The space pic, I'm not sure of the composition, although any suggestion I have to "improve" it seems very clich� to me.
You have a lot of objects on the canvas that are in more or less the same size range, if you think of them as abstract shapes.
The use of space and dimensions isn't very dynamic, but neither is it toned down enough to be very harmonious.
I would suggest either using a more exaggerated perspective - bring the humans in the foreground much closer to the viewpoint,
put either the asteroid or the spaceship further away - or going for a more rigid composition and keeping the depth to a minimum.
You could, for example, have a much wider shot of the whole event, with the planet at one end of the canvas, then the ship quite small,
and this ring of people echoing the circle of the planet, moving towards the asteroid at the other end.

Another idea for a dynamic picture would be to think of the viewpoint as being in the launch bay of a ship such as you see in the picture,
with the viewer maybe being one of these troopers, looking at their comrades departing and waiting their turn.
For me, one of the most interesting points here is the hangar where the people exit, but that is kind of lost in the composition now.
You could then have a second ship in the distance performing a similar mission, this would link in the viewer's mind with
what is happening in the foreground.

Then again, something that might make this image work better without messing with the composition much would be just to
tweak the lighting a bit. right now there's a lot of diffuse light, and you probably wanted to show off all the detail in the
spaceship and the asteroid, but it makes for a slightly bland image. In space you would generally have very stark lighting,
with deep, sharp shadows and bright highlights. Of course realism is not an end of it's own, but here I think a different type lighting would help.

On your second picture the action is good, there's a sense of movement but the scale is odd. It is difficult to judge size and distance
in this picture, the dragon is clearly viewed from below,
but the perspective of the castle turrets suggest
the viewpoint is not tilted very much up.Also it is hard to say what the size of the knight is in relation to the monster. A simple fix
to establish the knight's place in depth might be to have the hand seen in the lower left corner come in front of the knight's leg, also
creating the sense he's in immediate danger of being caught.

OK. Now that's done with, maybe I can justify saying a few words on the other subject that's come up here. There's really not that
much critique going on here as far as I can tell, certainly not if you're talking about more than just "the linework is a bit fuzzy" or
"the perspective isn't quite right". It's not hard to see why - giving good critique is difficult. Also it usually means giving bad critique,
which may seem like an unfriendly and presumptuous thing to do. It's often not immediately obvious what is really not working
in a painting, especially since usually people here post pictures with little in the way of explanation, so you can't know just what their
intentions were, what the most important thing they wanted to get out in their picture was.

I don't mean to say every painting should be interpreted as a philosophical statement - it seems obvious most of the work here
is not meant as such. But if someone makes a painting with the intention of displaying a really big dude with an enormous sci-fi
gun in action, then so be it, that is their main point, and their painting should be evaluated in terms of whether it brings that idea out
in the best way possible. A lot of the time it's just hard to get started, you get a picture in front of you and you think: "Oh."

It takes time and effort to get beyond the first impression, and a lot of the time you're not really sure the creator put as much effort
into developing the idea for their painting as you would have to put into breaking their work down and critiquing it. It's a good learning
experience, though, to analyze the work of others and see what works, what you would do differently and why. I know I don't do it
often enough myself - I'll confess I saw these two pictures from Lean before, but couldn't be bothered to formulate a decent reply,
and therefore said nothing. It happens more than I'd like to admit, and so I can't really tell others they should critique more. It would
be nice, though, if even a handful of people could find the time to do a decent critique of just a few paintings a week each.

[sometimes]

Interesting how you interpret differently.
What goes in the first pic for me is a seguence of a military astronaut being shot out of the mothership or launched as a protection against the exterior threat being located at the top right. We can follow the whole sequence from being launched until in the end where he enters the attack position aiming towards the dark threat. Composition works for me, aiming placed in the more to the left not middle pointing to the right whiche has more space in it if you take account for composition rules and the golden measurements (whatever its called in english).
Light good, dark bad.

Sure there are some perspective problems on the ship but I still like the pic as a whole.

You guys above. Can't you set aside rules and still like something in a pic? Perhaps because of the bending of the rules or perhaps just because it works anyway?
Every me & every you

[Lean Bean McQueen]

Whoah. Haven't received this much repllies for an art thread since the controversial "Monster Battle" piece I posted on Eatpoo years ago. I'm not proud to say it but that one distabilized the minds and moods of a few people

Thank you for the crits Affected. I'll always refer to your feedback (and those ones from others here) when I work on my next piece. And no worries about additional dialogues sprouting in this thread sometimes. It's all good.

[Synnical]

I like the idea of the first image, and it is interesting to look at. Though I think there's too much of a dark void between the soldiers and the floating asteroid thing; maybe you can add some subtle points of interest to liven things a bit, say, a couple brightly-coloured stars. If you can spend a little more time on it refining things, I think it has the potential to be a strong piece.

Not sure what to say about the second though, since it's nowhere near finished.