[Kazesama]

Okay, this is just some fan-art I did to try out the tablet I just got.
Obviously, it's Maleficent from Disney's Sleeping Beauty.
I'm still a great newbie in the world of CGin and I'd like to improve.

my question is, how could I give a "finished" look to this pic. I'm not unhappy with the CGin I did but it could be MUCH better.
What can I do to improve it



comments and crits are more than welcome

[Ian Jones]

From reading what you said and then looking at your picture I think your being too harsh on yourself. I don;t know anything about the Disney character, but it looks pretty good to me. I like the way the colour changes under the sleeve on the right arm, those dangly bits.

One of the problems is the lack of a background or an environment for him/her to exist in. Viewing against a hard white background doesn't usually do a character any justice, nor does it help you to render and shade. This is because you have such a strong bright mass of white space that influences your value choices and colours. Placing in some rough shapes or a simple idea in the background can really give you much more direction to take the painting in, aswell of course as helping you with lightsources, atmosphere etc...

As far as technique goes, I have some suggestions but it depends on whether you want to keep the linework or take it away completely. I'm assuming you placed the linework on a seperate layer, so my suggestion would be to hide it and now evaluate your painting. You'll probably see the forms just fall apart as the linework was probably holding it mostly together. The point I'm trying to make is that with linework painting tends to be a bit of a colouring in excercise. Without the lines, it falls apart. It is totally up to you whether you want to keep using linework and inking in your paintings, I have seen many fantastic uses of a combination of traditional comic book inking and CG colouring/shading. It depends where you want to take your style...

If you were to remove your linework you should see that all the edges, just the point at which you draw lines to indicate the edge of a form, are now undefined and that is why the lines were so important to the original painting. Without them you need to define those edges with painting instead of inking. Have a look around at some paintings here just to cue in your mind the concept I'm trying to explain (perhaps failing to explain! )

As I said above "with linework painting tends to be a bit of a colouring in excercise" you'll now see just why. Because you have had the lines there already when you go to paint and colour inside you don't need to hardly think about the edges of your forms. So the whole excercise tends to lean towards filling in the shapes, instead of defining your forms with painting and shading.

I hope you saw my point, it's just an attempt to explain perhaps a 'crutch' which the lnework can be (not always), especially when it comes to learning more about creating and developing your forms with brushstrokes and shading. So to take the next stage of learning about shading and rendering it is my opinion that you could try painting without using the linework right to the end. Sure use it in the beginning, almost everyone does but then they hide the layer and continue to develop the painting without them.

It's purely my opinion, take it or leave it. It really depends where you want to take your art, with linework/inking or without it.

I hope that helps in some way.

[Ian Jones]

I just thought of something that may help to illustrate my point a little further.

Looking again at your painting, specificially the horns on the cap. At the moment they seem to be filled with a flat black shading. The only cue for a viewer that they are rounded like a horn is because the linework indicates or suggests this due to its direction and shape of the lines. If you were to take the linework away all that would be left would be the flat black profile of them. This is an example of what I was talking about when you take away the linework the forms will fall apart. So you need to work on either painting without lines, or start enhancing them with much more defined shading.

[Kazesama]

I got your point very well Ian, and I guess your totally right.
but when I started it I didn't even want to shade it, maybe cel shade but not like this.
I'm gonna take your advice and try to color without the lineart and I guess it'll look better.
and indeed a bg would be a nice addition^^

thanks for your helpful comments ^_^