[t3hshrimp]

I've been looking for a place for great critiques and this thread caught my attention when I signed up. I'm so glad this thread exists!

I've been working on this painting for a while and I've come across a block. Context: It's about two super soldiers fighting each other while falling down a vertical alleyway.

My biggest issue is the color palette. The character's color in the foreground (with the red emissive) looks odd and I can't figure out why. Also, if there's anything else I can improve on this (particularly anatomy and perspective), I would very much appreciate it.

Thanks!

[AbleMai]

Hello, CG Hub! Thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to help out here.

I'd like some help on improving this guy. He's (?) one of three submissions I'm working on to a creature design contest on a Metroid fan site.

It's a tunnel crawler in a symbiotic relationship with a fungus, which grows on its behind like a puffball mushroom. If the puffball experiences trauma, say from a predator, it explodes with a small concussive blast, scattering spores and toxic gases. In addition to startling or damaging a predator, the blast propels the alien forward, giving it a running start away from danger. The tongues scrape up fungus and algae-like food stuffs.

I guess I want to improve my rendering and texture skills, and I'll take any other suggestions people can give and try to apply them to the other two. This was colored in GIMP 2. (I only have gimp and photoshop elements.)

Thanks a lot!

[irawan]

hi Amanda Cha ,
i hope this help you a bit.
cheers.heri

the ooriginal

[t3hshrimp]

Thank you so much irawan! I really dig the sparks, and the motion blur and bloom effects help pull the piece together some more.

[everythingfalls]

here is a update



but if you have any answers of my questions above pls reply me. =)

[Juto]

Hey Everything falls,

to accomplish what you put in your first post, I redrew the image.

I put the murderer in front because it would be too hard to see what is going on if he's farther away, and I lowered the horizon big time so the souls would have someplace to go. by putting souls coming out of the water, people understand that the lumps in the water are corpses.

You are very ambitious in your goals, but you still have quite a bit of fundamental studying to do before pulling this off. Keep working on anatomy and perspective, but keep doing illustrations like this if you can because they also teach you things.

good luck,
-J

[everythingfalls]

hey,

Juto thanks for your help! You`re right, I made a new one which I put the murderer in the front.
I try to participate every challenge here on Cghub to get better above all the anatomicea challenge.

[JohnSilva]

we gotta bring this up to life! its too precious to die, cmon guys lets work this out

[FreddyScribbles]

Could really use some help here. There are some things with the anatomy that are really off and bugging me but can't quite put my finger on them at present.

Clean legs

with new sketched legs

[Lhune]

This isn't really a paintover/redline for anyone in particular, but I drew this up the other day and I thought I'd share because it's done wrong so often. It's not a must to get right in fantasy art maybe, but it'll help your picture look more appealing and convincing.

[AbleMai]

I'd still really appreciate some help or critique on my little alien up there. He and the other one in my gallery got second place, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement.

[JohnSilva]

@AbleMai, I'll get back to you in around 1 hr

[AlexTooth]

Sry for the lameness of this paintover Ablemai - I'm sure some pros here can do better for you^^

I just wanted make one point for you - think of your creature as a 3D object - at the moment it looks quite 2D, the way you have shaded it.

Its easier to do this in black and white, when you're starting out. If you convert to greyscale and darken the whole monster, you you kind of have a silhouette - you can then think about where the light is coming from and apply the lighting with a lighter brush.

You can then add colour with a colour layermode. This was just done fast and looks kinda poo but spend a good amount of time on your lighting

[apacalyrical]

^Awesome Alextooth. You hit a really important spot for Abel's piece regarding rendering.

Just wanted to say, I usually have issues for my pieces that sometimes stump me, and am always looking for that nudge in the right direction. I saw the title of this and thought this was brilliant. Definitely I'll be contributing to this John, as this is sooo effin awesome hahahaha seriously, sometimes I just wished someone could do a paint over for my pieces to give me a better idea of what I am probably forgetting or not doing.

ANYWAYS, just came in here to tell Freddy Scribbles that I'll do a paint over later tonight once I finish my piece for the Character Forge Challenge(Which is due today :P).

[AbleMai]

Originally Posted by AlexTooth

Sry for the lameness of this paintover Ablemai - I'm sure some pros here can do better for you^^

I just wanted make one point for you - think of your creature as a 3D object - at the moment it looks quite 2D, the way you have shaded it.

Its easier to do this in black and white, when you're starting out. If you convert to greyscale and darken the whole monster, you you kind of have a silhouette - you can then think about where the light is coming from and apply the lighting with a lighter brush.

You can then add colour with a colour layermode. This was just done fast and looks kinda poo but spend a good amount of time on your lighting

Oh, wow! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. You're absolutely right- I see it now. (How humbling, heehee...) I'll definitely practice this on some of my other sketches!