Pimping my portfolio - please destroy me in a wave of critiques!
polycounter lvl 11
(Okay so I hope portfolio review requests are appropriate here)
Here it is:
http://jordylakiere.com/
I've been dieing for some relentless, thorough portfolio reviewing. The only extra thing to know about me is I'm trying to land some jobs with the bigger companies now (think wizards, applibot etc) and in general trying to expand/stabilize my income. (which is dodgy at best)
Other than that all you need to know/see should be on there.
The pieces, the website, the text, anything goes. Positive notes are helpful too, what shines? What sucks? Please go berseker! Don't hold back, I can take it.
(that's what she said)
Here it is:
http://jordylakiere.com/
I've been dieing for some relentless, thorough portfolio reviewing. The only extra thing to know about me is I'm trying to land some jobs with the bigger companies now (think wizards, applibot etc) and in general trying to expand/stabilize my income. (which is dodgy at best)
Other than that all you need to know/see should be on there.
The pieces, the website, the text, anything goes. Positive notes are helpful too, what shines? What sucks? Please go berseker! Don't hold back, I can take it.
(that's what she said)
Replies
Colossus - I'm having difficulty seeing the "colossus" I assume is supposed to be the large rock thing in the background. I can make out a face (eye, nose), but it's not super clear and is easiest to see when you're zoomed out a fair bit. I think this could be made stronger by having the colossus a little easier to read, and perhaps facing more towards the guy in the lower-right to help with overall composition. I'm also reasonably certain it's spelled "colossus", rather than "collosus" as it is on your website & in the file name.
Remus & Romulus - Wolf's body is reading a little flat to me, & the drastic motion in the tail seems odd given the relatively soft & quiet positioning of the rest of the wolf. As a whole I like this image a lot.
Battle at Monghadi - I dig it, but think it could benefit from more color variation and bits of more rendered detail in the crowd all along the outside of the images. It's a real consistent yellow/green, and parts of it look like an indistinguishable mass with a color simply overlayed (rather than being there in the strokes themselves). I know that especially in a shrunk down version going into a lot of detail would be wasteful for the fighting crowd, so maybe just the introduction of a few other colored strokes here and there would be fine on their own.
As a whole I think your environments are more confident looking than your characters. You seem very comfortable with trees, grass, rocks, etc. I haven't seen much of your stuff before, so this was nice to look through. I think on the whole this is pretty solid.
You are already at quite a high level, and i think you are looking for some very technical critique if I'm not mistaken. So I'm going to try and do that as best as i can.
The Shaming of the King:
I get the feeling you used a lot of photo reference for the top character, but when I'm looking at the dwarf there are a ton of structural problems, mostly in the perspective of the limbs, it's really kind of bizarre, it's like the two characters were drawn by completely different people.
Form is king, no amount of rendering will save shitty form.
Father of Dragons:
Let me be the first to say this piece FUGGIN ROCKS. It's metal as all shit. the only problem being you are too timid with your colours, be bold man. Push that shit! It has great colours, but they are far too subdued.
Here i ran some sharpness, noise, and i boosted the vibrance globally, then even more by masking to just the blue channel.
The lesson here is that you have a great colour and value sense to you, but don't be afraid to push how colorful your pieces are.
I didn't realise how much i loved this image until i got it into photoshop.
So really the main take aways here.
A good exercise is create a pre-determined palette to use, that way you are limited to the colours there and have to figure ways out to get the results you want.
Another thing to consider is distance of things within a piece when using colour. The red close up won't be the same leagues away. Having a similar colour throughout will flatten pieces.
This is one of my favourite pieces, I brought the brightness up a bit so you could see the form more in the troll and shifted the colours slightly to more away from the familiar complimentary colours.
(when I was in fine arts they said only if it worked, never to use paint out of the tube, always mix and keep colours fresh)
In Shaming of the king, my eyes go first to the elf's torso armor, is that what you want me to look at first? I would think the king's reaction, the cutting of the beard and the elf's expression is where your story takes place. I would then use every element and principle of art to draw focus to those areas. The area you want people to look first should have the most contrasting tones, hardest edges, colors, etc. then the second place you want people to look at should have less focus than the first area but more than the rest, and so one. that's what I mean when I say you need to work in story direction.
I really like the idea behind Collosus, but the composition is split in half, giving it a more neutral/less dynamic balance. if you took away half of the green ground out and use that space for the rock giant in the background, he would seem a lot more imposing since he covers more frame, and the stick man would seem in a worse situation.
Coloured light never shifts the hue of an object, instead all it can do is emphasise the properties of that object.
Take a red ball for instance, it only reflects the red light portion of the white light back to the viewers eyes, and shining a blue light onto it wont change that, instead you will end up with a very dark red because it can only reflect what little red there was in that blue light.
The reason why we see hue shifts between light and shadow is because the shadow is usually lit with bounce light and scattered atmospheric light, and when light is scattered or bounced it is filtered, taking out elements of the light and leaving the rest. So on a sunny day the only reason the shadows are more blue is because the scattered light is more blue.
Atmospheric filtering is also exaggerated too much by most artists, it is very very subtle effect, and when it does work it usually serves to flatten values, and only to a much smaller effect does it desaturate colours.
seriously take a look at this photo and look at how strong the local colours are despite it being a rainy day. http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/5408534.jpg
Of course we can exaggerate these effects and choose to completely ignore how light works and still get kickass results. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3r9NjMvvj4/SXf1maP-bNI/AAAAAAAAAXM/YKcyAuo_koA/s1600-h/hama_act.jpg
Anyways i thought i would throw in my 2 cents there.
Though my knowledge of colour comes from a more painterly approach when I studied in Fine Arts. We were taught to create base colours from oils and then modulate it with hue, as to keep it within the same family, that way when you started shifting/describing form that way it'll have some uniformity to it. That and I was taught to never paint out of the tube and explore variations of colour.
During my final year I was really into the works of Euan Uglow, Melanie Authier, Ann Gale, and the theories of a friend on colour, Justin Oglivie.
There are indeed multiple approaches to tackle colour, more moody, more sciency, it's great to know what is out there and to try them all out. And see the results you get.
It really boils down to the intention of the artist. And if they are trying to head towards more rules grounded in this reality or throw it into a theatrical realm.
It's always nice to have a set of rules to abide by, but at some point it's time to see how close you can fly to the sun before your wings start burning off.
Really when i talk about this i try and stress that colour theory != lighting theory, lighting theory is all the stuff i'm talking about, whereas colour theory is the psychology of how colour works. I don't think it's helpful at all to confuse the dialog, because for every example that you can show me in a photo of colour theory working, I'll show you a photo of that theory breaking.
I think that the painterly throw it all to the wind and let aesthetics decide way of painting produces gorgeous results in the right hands, but i don't think it's wise to fill your toolbox with just that, ideally you should have both skills in that toolbox.
There is a reason why people like brad rigney and craig mullins can make white ambient light look so full and lush. http://cryptcrawler.deviantart.com/art/Magic-the-Gathering-Acidic-Slime-309684220
https://st.free-lance.ru/users/Ll/Llewella/upload/f_4888e4c120aff.jpg
Only other thing I'd say is that you have a bit of a drop off in quality towards the end (guilty of this myself in my folio) in so much as you start pretty strong but then I feel less wowed the further down the images I go. I think the shark piece at the bottom is easily the weakest (anatomy feels very loose and the brushwork isn't as strong as earlier pieces). If you can get another couple of strong pieces done, I'd be tempted to remove the last four pieces, as they're definitely not as good as the upper pieces.
Hope that helps, you have a great eye for composition and narrative, no reason with some of the other advice here taken into account that you couldn't have a shot at some of those bigger clientele!