Looking for feedback on my first portfolio piece!
polycounter lvl 7
Hey guys, I just finished painting my first portofolio piece, it was quite the effort and I would like to hear some feedback before calling it quits.
After 9 months of learning and piling up studies I decided that it was time to start working on my portfolio.
Thanks for the help!
After 9 months of learning and piling up studies I decided that it was time to start working on my portfolio.
Thanks for the help!
Replies
This picture is quite striking in a lot of ways, but I'm personally not too keen on all the high frequency details.
I think you could stand to push the background further back, for one, especially if it's snowing. I feel all the detail and contrast back there detracts from the focal point of the girl.
Another thing I think you could spend some more love and time on is said girl's face. The construction is a little flimsy (she's missing some forms, and the colors are kind of strange). Hope you don't mind a paintover, here's one + a super messy and kinda inaccurate construction breakdown (it's not by actual construction per se, but how I remember how to do it which is kind of bad practice so don't... copy it lol).
I don't think that mine's hot shit either, but I hope it can give you a step in the right direction on pushing it a bit more.
Something else to reference when redoing this, other than real life faces, might be a Planes of the Face ref.
(I also noticed while doing this that her right arm, the magic one, is a little odd? The elbow is bent funny, and it's lacking some muscles. There needs to be folds across the kimono sleeve, too).
Finally, some detail stuff that might just give it a nice effect. I think the girl could stand to have some sort of intent in her eyes. At the moment she's kind of a blank slate, but she could be showing some sort of emotion to make the viewer feel threatened, scared, or like they're about to be blessed. Maybe she's just a cheeky fox demon, I dunno. Take it somewhere! In this wind, I think there'd be some stray strands of hair flying about, too.
And if she is a spirit, you might want to think about fastening her kimono right-over-left instead of left-over-right. That's traditionally how kimonos for corpses are fastened.
All in all, most of this is a little nit-picky, construction issues aside. It's a good picture! Keep up the good work, dude, and I can't wait to see your portfolio once you've built up a few pieces!
Thanks for taking the time to do this, I'll take in account what you said and try to improve it!
One simple way to track this kind of things it to keep in mind an easy rule : if the observer/person behind the camera is a regular-sized human standing up (which is very likely the case here), then the head of every human in the scene will be sitting on the horizon line. Like here :
(arguably the person taking the first picture is on the tall side, and on that second picture the person holding the camera might have been hunching just a bit, but you get the idea.)
Another useful thing to keep in mind is to think of movies and how widescreen pictures work. Here are some example from GoT :
The lens you chose to "shoot your painting with" will directly influence the amount of things that you can actually show in the frame, and their placement relative to each other. Putting too many elements in the space of the frame will quickly end up making the image look like a collage rather than an immersive piece that sucks the viewer in. Besides actual movie stills, storyboards are a great reference.
I hope this helps !
As you can see there are huge consequences in terms of distortion, focus, and in the way things relate in the space of the canvas.
You can see this in the last shot you posted, the photographer is aiming at her mid-section to keep the camera level and frame the model in the scene.
For tight headshots, generally you want to be at head level, which means standing straight up for an adult, crouching a bit for a child and getting on the ground for a toddler/cat/dog/etc.
Similarly : If I place my hand over the woman in kimono and the shrine, to hide them, I feel like I a looking through a 50 mm lens ; yet if I isolate the woman alone, it feels as if she was painted with a much more narrower telephoto (except for her feet, actually)
Anyways ! Lots of things to think about
Oh yeah, absolutely. More than trying to define any "rules" or anything like that I wanted to mention how the trees etc would start to converge if you had taken this shot at head level, and then recomposed to frame her in the top 1/3rd. Looking back she's almost centered so my point is basically moot. :poly124:
Yeah I definitely agree there, there is a certain flatness to the character that makes it appear like the scene and her have different perspective characteristics.
I made some of the changes suggested by bagel. At this point tho I don't really think I can change the perspective for the girl without destroing the picture ^^'
here's a few pointers that you might want to take into account in your future works:
1. Never be afraid to destroy previous work if its wrong.
2. Don't try to mix different ideas all into one painting, try to keep the illustration simple. eg. A landscape of a snow covered forest. see its simple and clear.
in this case, you have, a girl casting a spell in landscape of a snow covered forest near an altar while a dear is watching.
notice the difference ? : )
3.composition is key when doing illustrations
i made a paintover that might help
sorry if that was harsh but I've struggled with composition for the longest time until someone gave me this advice, cheers and happy painting!
When you finally feel comfortable with this - things get really fun.
the girl is actually a yuki-onna (a spirit of a dead woman that doesn't look really ghostly from what I've read) so she is related to her tomb, she's not really casting a spell it's more of a symbol that represent the winter and her death.
I was actually very propense to leave out the girl if it wasn't that this is also a commission for a friend and she wanted everyting that is in there
For the destroying part I don't think I could do that after spending 10 hours on a piece which I'm actually pretty happy with. I don't have problems scrapping my studies, but I usually keep my time limit at 1h and 30mins. Being this one of the few pieces that are not studies I kinda got attached to it even if I know it's wrong to do so.
I'm really thankful for the tips you given me btw
You'll find that early on, but the more you practice the more eager you will be to constantly alter things as you go. You will chop into things, rip things out, straight up paint over stuff - getting attached is something you learn to get over, like everything else and you find that your images become much more dynamic and alive when you do that.
Don't get attached. As I always say, learn to hate your own work. I know it sounds counter intuitive but you replace the the love you had for your work with the urge to learn and develop as an artist.
When you are working on a painting and you find yourself really proud of one part of it and you end up working around it, even though that one part doesn't gel with the rest - the entire image will suffer for it and whatever you see in that one part you loved, will be lost to everyone else who sees it.
Keep at it though dude! Nice lighting.
Thanks Hazzard! Yeah it's something I need to learn for personal pieces too, I guess than when you do a study you don't really get attached to it since you didn't really created anything new.
I felt this freedom while doing master studies and after 40 min painting a sea I just grabbed a big brush and painted a new flat color over it and started again. It's something I kinda have within me but need to expand to things that I'm not used doing (personal pieces or commissions).
Thank you one more time for the great advices