critique for @SCerulean ! the original image is by them :D space to look through images and mouse to scroll the image around.
1. (original image) Again, I love what you did with this! There's some nice rendering going on in the folds of the clothing and on the face. My suggestion regarding colors is to experiment more with your shading colors; right now it looks like you just turned down the lightness and saturation, making it look a bit gray without variation. I'd also say that in terms of shading, where objects touch directly, it should be a lot darker where they meet! Like, on the inside of her arm and where it meets her chest/the apron; also, the gold belt and embroidery should be shaded right where it meets the other clothes. I'll go over some other stuff in the next images, so press space and keep reading! 2. (with monochrome filter) I put a black and white filter over the original image to check the contrast of the image. As you can see, there is good contrast between the light and dark sides of the drawing! However, in the background the ground and sky seem to blend into each other, making them indistinct. It's also a bit difficult to tell where Emara's chest ends and upper arm begins on the left side of the image. 3. (tracing of original structure + proportions) This is where I think the most improvement could be made right now, on the proportions and anatomy! The arms and head look nice, but there's a lot of missing structure in the torso and the legs, making them look a bit lumpy. Breaking down the proportions, you can also tell that the legs are quite short compared to the rest of the body (just over 1/3 of the total height). To understand the bones and musculature of people, I'd recommend a combination of life drawing and studying anatomy! (I can link you to the tutorial that I made about it too, if you haven't seen it yet) 4. (proportion drawings) I conjured up these two sketches with slightly different proportions! A is close to the cartoon proportions used in the show, with a big head and big hands, and a smaller body overall. Her legs also take up about half of her total height. B is more of the semi-realistic style you were using (although I just copy pasted the face from A haha); the head is smaller and the neck is widened but shorter, and the missing height from the resizing is replaced by a larger torso while the legs stay the same height but are widened a bit. You can see that the head is now quite a bit less wide than the shoulders! 5. (redrawing of original w/ new proportions) I used the proportion guidelines from the B sketch to redraw the image in a similar position! However, now I think I want to point out that the pose itself looks a bit awkward viewed from the front. Two potential fixes are changing the pose to have a clearer action line (you can trace a smooth path through the character's body in one motion) or changing the angle from which she's being viewed to alter the action line that way. I went for the latter in the final image! 6. (alternate composition) I tried to make the image more dynamic by changing the angle of the "camera", having her fill more of the frame, using some perspective, and establishing an action line for the pose. I think it could still be better (maybe push the waist forward a bit and turn the hips in so the front leg is closer and the back hip/leg is more towards the right side of the screen?) but I should be doing my homework so I can't go redo it ^^; anyway I hope this was helpful! Keep working and you'll get even more amazing :D
