press space for @-WinterSky- original! This is a critique / edit of the original project. original artwork by @-WinterSky- Modified art by me :3 Critique in N+C
You got an awesome start with your piece, and with some refining you're only going to get better :D My personal favorite part of your original painting was the colors and shading you used on the skin. I loved the painterly look and the splashes of color you put in with the blush! I also like your stylization of facial features, very elegant. The part that I wanted to change the most was the hair, and specifically that the way you lighted and shaded it was rather incongruous with the rest of the painting. I think it was probably the combination of very soft shading with the hard streaks of dark and light. List of stuff that I ended up changing: -Location of the pink coloration. I really liked that watercolor effect that you got with it, and actually I didn't manage to replicate it (so you've got that on me, haha!), but I think it looks better placed towards the front of the face, where the cheekbone is. When you feel the areas of your face, I think you can tell why! This comes down to more observational drawing and practice, so having a feel for it should come with time. -Colors of the face shading. I kept some of the desaturated darker color below the neck and under the chin, but I also added in some areas a more saturated, reddish/orange version of the color in the transition areas between light and dark. This brings the skin to life a little more; a lot of the skin on our faces has translucency to it, so some of the light passes through the layers of tissue/blood vessels at thinner areas and appears to make it glow (like when you hold up your hand to a bright light, the edges of your fingers look red). -Width of the head. I made it a bit less wide, bringing in the ear closer to the rest of the face as well. Keeping it wide could also be a valid stylistic choice though! I just found it difficult to shade accurately because it causes some distortion of the side of the face. -The structure of the hair. For me, using reference photos as a starting point, especially for the braid, really helped me lay down the shapes that I wanted the hair to be. Take your time, because it makes up a significant part of the piece :) Particularly for that crown braid, I found that drawing a solid arc that I wanted it to follow along the head was a life-saver! Something else specific to this hairstyle is how the hair on the top of the head is pulled into the braid at certain points. -Shading of the hair. I cheated a bit and drew some lineart for the darkest strands, but I think it still looks alright! I think it would benefit your hair shading a lot to blend together the areas of soft and hard shading instead of doing them separately. The way I like to do that (especially with stylized/semi-realism hair) is to break down the hair into many sections, and then include some visible strands following the shapes of each section. This way, I know the general forms and can keep the dark soft shading and dark strands together within the form (so they transition in and out of each other) and do the same with the light parts! I don't think I explained that well, so feel free to ask questions (same goes with anything else I say in this critique) -The color of the hair. Because the skin is on the desaturated side, to avoid making it look gray compared to the hair, I decided to tone down the color of the hair to match it. I tried to keep it looking blue with the shading and lighting, though, by increasing the saturation slightly there. Now that I think about it, I believe you could keep the base color as it was previously if you shaded it a certain way, but I'm not totally sure, so keep experimenting to find out what works for you! -Added eyebrow. It still looked fine without one, but I figured why not >w< to me it looks slightly more natural! -Changed where the neck was. This will depend on posing, but usually the neck is tilted slightly forward! -More shading on the face. For some added dimension on the facial features, adding darkness in areas like under the neck, under the chin, and at the corners of the eyes will help add contrast! the location of where the shading will end up is going to change depending on lighting angles, though. -Eyes and eye shading. I kept the shape, but I wanted to make the eyelashes and pupil darker, and make the iris more saturated. This is something that I just recently learned about, but by making certain areas darker than others, you can pull attention towards them! I shaded the iris a bit differently as well, with darker color at the top and lighter at the bottom. The way you shade eyes will depend on your style though, and this just happens to be the way I do it! -Bounce lighting. Colors will bounce onto other surfaces when close enough, especially in bright light. Hopefully you can see that I put a little blue light coming off the hair onto the skin, and some red/orange light off the skin onto the hair in areas where they meet!
