Wanted to do something Giger-ish for a while, been a crappy week so I spent my time doing this off and on. I don't really like the way it turned out, but that's ok I guess.
What is it that feels wrong to you about the piece? If you can tell me what you'd like to improve I can probably come up with some suggestions. There are things I might suggest you try differently but that might come down to taste.
Hey there Cluly. I'd actually written up a response to this thread several days ago, but decided against posting it since I wasn't really sure what you were going for and didn't want to throw my own tastes too much into the mix.
As Stinkhorse said, something like this - so heavily inspired by someone else's work, it can be difficult to critique without knowing what exactly your intentions are and what you would like to improve upon. From a purely "comparing it to Giger" point of view, I think it's lacking in visual interest. I'll admit, I'm not a personal fan of Giger, but I've always viewed his stuff to be about his designs - and the meticulous details going into them. This is clearly inspired by Giger's work, but I think it's missing a lot of the smaller details throughout the piece to make it pop and keep it interesting throughout. I think you can help yourself a lot by just throwing some additional highlights on the various bits you've got going on throughout, as they're reading pretty flat and faded at the moment.
That being said, there are some things that look very much inspired by certain paintings I think could be improved upon - things like the eye sizes/shapes, nose shape, etc. It's one reason I've not always been a fan myself, they're very "alien", and don't always look right to my eyes.
Hoping you don't mind, I did a paintover of some things to consider. Going to preface by saying, a significant amount of my changes are personal preference of what I like to see in an image.
Mostly:
-Change shape/additional rendering on eyes, mouth, and nose. Given the face sort of is the painting, these parts looking right and being given attention seemed important.
-Additional highlights and level changes throughout the background. Trying to bring out some of the visual interest that's present, just muted in the original.
-Bit of extra detail at the forehead area, it felt empty and while I will say (hopefully inoffensively) that your first image sort of looked like it had some genitalia on the forehead, I thought having something there was nice.
-Additional color (mostly the blueish/greenish light/highlights that don't make much sense and are again purely there for the sake of adding visual interest). I'm a huge fan of color, while I get that the Giger influence generally means a fairly monochromatic image - I feel like one other color in the mix can bring things to life a bit more - help it be stronger as a whole.
So as I said, lots of my personal preference in there, but if it gives you some things to consider then I suppose all the better. I think you've got a pretty strong base, and some additional details and rendering could make it pretty solid.
TwoListen pretty much nailed every point I was thinking including the reason why I opened with the question of what you wanted out of this. Man knows what's up.
Oh wow, thanks for the paint over and crit. Interesting lighting is something I struggle with, I love the lighting in the paintover, especially in the background.
- I can see the eye size problem now, your proportions are bang on. However I probably won't include the eye lashes, that was intentional like leaving out eyebrows, it adds a touch of "somethings not quite right." about the eyes.
- I love the pop your background has in the paint over.
- Yeah I'll add that back in, it was in the original sketch I was just wonder what to place there, Giger uses snakes or skulls in those areas, but I wanted to bring something of my own into the mix. All the layers are broken down so I think I will reiterate that.
- I was aiming for monochrome or even an analogous color range, but I love color too so I think I will revisit that.
Things that feel wrong to me are the sloppy brush work and my lack of edge definition, I need to work on that I think; and on my lighting too. The aim of the piece is basically to learn, but keep at it until I'm happy overall with the image, I do/did a lot of sloppy speed painting and nothing every felt final, I want this to be different.
I'm glad that helped Cluly, and yeah, I definitely would encourage you to play around on your own with various ideas. My changes were just the first ones I noticed, and the ones that occurred to me at the time - just meant to hint at some additional possibilities. To be straight with you, 90% of the time when I do a paintover, it's because I'm not entirely sure what I'd even be able to do to improve it, so I do it as a learning experience for myself as well.
Regarding edge definition and lighting improvements, really I think one happens as a result of the other. Understanding (and sometimes just playing with) light and shadow is what defines your edges, gives things shape. I don't pretend to have a strong technical grasp of this stuff, but generally anytime I'm finding my shapes or edges getting lost - I just ask myself, "Can I throw another light, shadow, or color onto this somehow - or am I missing one of these things that should be there, given my lighting setup?" It's a little overwhelming experimenting with that sometimes, but it can be fun, too.
I will keep an eye out for additional updates. :thumbup:
Currently here ... however I some how managed to save it at a smaller resolution so I have to res up the image and repaint some of it, ah well, live and learn I guess.
I think I'm going to carry on with it, certain things bother me in the details, or lack of details. I've been working on this in the background too, its a repaint or an older painting I did.
I quiet like the composition in it, but I think it needs something else, maybe a figure she's looking down at.
Cool. I'd say you should keep working the eyes, they still feel very almondy. And the lighting could be punched up to put more emphasis on the face while letting the sides and background fall off a bit more. I'm not nearly as good at painting as a lot of the guys, but here's my two fifteen-minutes worth of cents.
hehe, I've just been repainting the eyes to something like that too. Looking more at gigers work, his eyes, noses, mouths etc have twisted qualities to them I'm never noticed before, a carved mechanical look too them. I've repainted the nose a couple of times with something more realistic but I just default back to the original, it becomes to life like and not "not quiet right"
After looking up Giger's woman I see what you mean. That really goes back to the question then of are you trying to replicate Giger's style or are you trying to create something inspired by his work? It's not an either or thing, just trying to determine where you're placing the slider to dial in suggestions.
In regards to your second piece that's got some great forms and suggestion in it. The 'head' is pretty striking as a silhouette. Are you going to be refining it in the Giger style or is it aimed in a different direction?
That's a good question, I think the only way I can answer that is I sit in the middle of replicating it and inspired by, I don't want an exact copy, that's just boring, but I want the influence to show.
I wanted to refine the second one a lot more, I think the original image I did from about 5 years ago was a Matrix influence (and probably some Silent Hill) I'm not exactly sure now. I'm really trying to nail down a composition first and some edge definition for it, but I think I might struggle with the forms and design without a line drawing. Here's the original I was referring too:
real nice lighting in the last one! i think its a improvment from the others. maybe consider using more varied colors for the non lit parts. the trees looks a little bit to monocromatic wiht only green.
keep up the good work!
Replies
As Stinkhorse said, something like this - so heavily inspired by someone else's work, it can be difficult to critique without knowing what exactly your intentions are and what you would like to improve upon. From a purely "comparing it to Giger" point of view, I think it's lacking in visual interest. I'll admit, I'm not a personal fan of Giger, but I've always viewed his stuff to be about his designs - and the meticulous details going into them. This is clearly inspired by Giger's work, but I think it's missing a lot of the smaller details throughout the piece to make it pop and keep it interesting throughout. I think you can help yourself a lot by just throwing some additional highlights on the various bits you've got going on throughout, as they're reading pretty flat and faded at the moment.
That being said, there are some things that look very much inspired by certain paintings I think could be improved upon - things like the eye sizes/shapes, nose shape, etc. It's one reason I've not always been a fan myself, they're very "alien", and don't always look right to my eyes.
Hoping you don't mind, I did a paintover of some things to consider. Going to preface by saying, a significant amount of my changes are personal preference of what I like to see in an image.
Mostly:
-Change shape/additional rendering on eyes, mouth, and nose. Given the face sort of is the painting, these parts looking right and being given attention seemed important.
-Additional highlights and level changes throughout the background. Trying to bring out some of the visual interest that's present, just muted in the original.
-Bit of extra detail at the forehead area, it felt empty and while I will say (hopefully inoffensively) that your first image sort of looked like it had some genitalia on the forehead, I thought having something there was nice.
-Additional color (mostly the blueish/greenish light/highlights that don't make much sense and are again purely there for the sake of adding visual interest). I'm a huge fan of color, while I get that the Giger influence generally means a fairly monochromatic image - I feel like one other color in the mix can bring things to life a bit more - help it be stronger as a whole.
So as I said, lots of my personal preference in there, but if it gives you some things to consider then I suppose all the better. I think you've got a pretty strong base, and some additional details and rendering could make it pretty solid.
- I can see the eye size problem now, your proportions are bang on. However I probably won't include the eye lashes, that was intentional like leaving out eyebrows, it adds a touch of "somethings not quite right." about the eyes.
- I love the pop your background has in the paint over.
- Yeah I'll add that back in, it was in the original sketch I was just wonder what to place there, Giger uses snakes or skulls in those areas, but I wanted to bring something of my own into the mix. All the layers are broken down so I think I will reiterate that.
- I was aiming for monochrome or even an analogous color range, but I love color too so I think I will revisit that.
Things that feel wrong to me are the sloppy brush work and my lack of edge definition, I need to work on that I think; and on my lighting too. The aim of the piece is basically to learn, but keep at it until I'm happy overall with the image, I do/did a lot of sloppy speed painting and nothing every felt final, I want this to be different.
Thanks for taking the time, that helped ALOT!
Regarding edge definition and lighting improvements, really I think one happens as a result of the other. Understanding (and sometimes just playing with) light and shadow is what defines your edges, gives things shape. I don't pretend to have a strong technical grasp of this stuff, but generally anytime I'm finding my shapes or edges getting lost - I just ask myself, "Can I throw another light, shadow, or color onto this somehow - or am I missing one of these things that should be there, given my lighting setup?" It's a little overwhelming experimenting with that sometimes, but it can be fun, too.
I will keep an eye out for additional updates. :thumbup:
I quiet like the composition in it, but I think it needs something else, maybe a figure she's looking down at.
Paintover:
In regards to your second piece that's got some great forms and suggestion in it. The 'head' is pretty striking as a silhouette. Are you going to be refining it in the Giger style or is it aimed in a different direction?
I wanted to refine the second one a lot more, I think the original image I did from about 5 years ago was a Matrix influence (and probably some Silent Hill) I'm not exactly sure now. I'm really trying to nail down a composition first and some edge definition for it, but I think I might struggle with the forms and design without a line drawing. Here's the original I was referring too:
keep up the good work!