Learning from Crits

At Illuxcon I received a lot of really helpful advice on my portfolio, and since getting back I've been working on fixing up some of the problems people pointed out in my work as well as trying to polish them up and make them nice and sparkly. In this post I'll be sharing some of the feedback I recieved on some of my work as well as before-and-after shots. Hopefully some of you can get something out of the seeing the upgrades to my own work.

First up is my Owlbear piece. This piece has gone through revisions before. During my first pass at revising this piece I mainly focused on adding some more detail and finesse, but during my portfolio review with Robh Ruppel I learned a few new things I could do to make the piece really pop more. Mainly adding more muscle definition in the extended arm to really give a feel of action and ferocity.

Before crits

After crits

Notes

Next up, my Feiya piece, done as a promotional piece for Paizo. Again, I've reworked this one before too, just pushing the detail and refining some things. Some people suggested I push the slime a bit and make it more detailed.

Before crits

After crits

Notes

Next up is my Dream Devouring Demon. The dream-catcher webbing had a lazy execution first time around so I went in and really looked at a good dream-catcher for reference. After fixing it I was immediately much more satisfied with the result. It's amazing how something that seems so unimportant at first makes such a huge difference when done right. I was also told by many people that I need to focus on varying up my colors more and adding hue shifts throughout a material. It shouldn't always be "this is this color, this is that color" everything should have some other colors poking through here and there to add interest and realism to what you're painting.

Before crits

After crits

Notes

Up next, is the Man form of my Beastmaster. I got a lot of really helpful notes on this piece, but not all of the problems were fixed in the end. Sometimes it's better to take the lessons you've learned from an old piece and just apply that information towards your future work. From crits on this piece, I learned a lot about how you should arrange your values in a piece. Your focus should have the most contrast (darkest darks and lightest lights) but in this piece the bushes are really fighting with the figure for attention due to how dark they are. I worked on adjusting the values of the bushes and I even did some reshaping to them so they weren't creeping up on the figure so much, but in the end I was only able to do so much without completely repainting those areas. I definitely learned a lot from this piece due to the failures within.

Before crits

After crits

Notes

Lastly, the piece that headed my portfolio and received the greatest response from people I showed my portfolio to, my Beast-form Beastmaster. A lot of the feedback I received for the man-form Beastmaster piece applies to this as well, but I was able to fix a lot of those problems a little better with this piece. First of all, I had a lot of tree braches just poking into the image, somewhat awkwardly and it took away some of the impact of the composition and took attention away from the focus, so I just took them out and everything immediately started to feel better. I also tried to lighten up the foreground so it wasn't competing with the figure for attention so much. Chris Rahn was a huge help on this piece too. You can see in a lot of his work he really punches up the saturation and color in the shadows of his work and it creates a big impact on the viewer. This is something I hope to bring into all of my future work, so I'm excited to do some more original pieces.

Before crits

After crits

Notes

Side-note about this piece, I attended New York Comic Con last weekend where I got to meet one of my favorite artists, Dave Rapoza, and he mentioned that he was a fan of the triangle composition in this piece. The reason I mention this is because I had no idea that was what I had done in this piece, it wound up being a happy accident that I came up with a strong composition. When you are looking for feedback on your work (or even giving feedback to someone else) I think it's a good idea to say what you think is working just as much as what isn't working. Sometimes we do things well without even thinking it through and then we don't ever go back to it because we hadn't realized what was so good about it. It's good to know what you've done right so you can keep doing it as well as what is wrong so you can work eliminating the problems in your work.

The biggest thing I learned from all of my crits is that I tend to stop working on a piece when it's about 90% done. I'm the kind of person who always tries to finish a piece in as few sittings as possible so I tend to convince myself it's good enough without really pushing pieces to their full potential. My reworking of these pieces was my way of trying to see just how far I can really push my work if I give it all the time it needs. Looking at all of these before-and-afters reminds me that I really need to not focus on rushing to a piece's end, but more focusing on getting everything just right and working out all of my problems.

I hope you enjoyed this post and are able to apply some of the lessons I've learned to your own work. Thanks for reading!