I guess the biggest thing jumping out to me is the photoshop layer styles... Ease up on them man. It makes your stuff look super cliche/corny/outdated because any and every soccer mom with photoshop uses layer styles. They should be used just to enhance something... but you put bevels, strokes, and dropshadows on just about everything.
Really liking some of your hardsurface concepts though! Keep the stuff coming.
Your work is very hit and miss, it's weird. You're actually pretty decent at detail work, but you fall really far behind in anatomy, weight, and general painting.
Some of your projects have an explosion of way too much detail and you lose the focus.
I would also suggest stop naming projects with "dude, chick, thing." It makes it seem you don't even care enough about your own work to give it a simple name, which can be interpreted as amateur.
Definitely keep it up. Really study anatomy and Google some different approaches to digital painting or browse Conceptart.org for a few days to find tons of amazing artists and try to wrap your head around their execution.
When your basics & painting get as solid as your details are, you'll be awesome.
tip on shading in your concepts that I could have done with a long time ago. Dark and Light area's are more than where you expect them to be, it seems your shading leaves mostly midtones, which is what makes your concepts look fairly flat.
My advice would be to start off with a perfect gray layer. then a colour layer on top and a line art ontop of that, have the colour layer use overlay.
To shade you keep darkening the gray layer. then when the shadows are deep but the form still visible start working in subtle highlights by brightening up parts of the gray layer, then work in the sharp highlights which should compliment the form.
Quick paintover example, all I've done here is overlay the original image with the gray layer I mentioned underneath.
Nothing special, you can do it a lot better when you make it your actual workflow.
Don't want to be harsh, i think your lines and concepts are pretty good (slight proportions error with perspective), but the texture and color work kinda ruins it. Improvement through the thread thou.
So i re-did a couple old characters, some concepts and anatomy studies and a new high to low one model... still need alot of improvement... thats for checking them out....
Replies
Really liking some of your hardsurface concepts though! Keep the stuff coming.
Some of your projects have an explosion of way too much detail and you lose the focus.
I would also suggest stop naming projects with "dude, chick, thing." It makes it seem you don't even care enough about your own work to give it a simple name, which can be interpreted as amateur.
Definitely keep it up. Really study anatomy and Google some different approaches to digital painting or browse Conceptart.org for a few days to find tons of amazing artists and try to wrap your head around their execution.
When your basics & painting get as solid as your details are, you'll be awesome.
My advice would be to start off with a perfect gray layer. then a colour layer on top and a line art ontop of that, have the colour layer use overlay.
To shade you keep darkening the gray layer. then when the shadows are deep but the form still visible start working in subtle highlights by brightening up parts of the gray layer, then work in the sharp highlights which should compliment the form.
Quick paintover example, all I've done here is overlay the original image with the gray layer I mentioned underneath.
Nothing special, you can do it a lot better when you make it your actual workflow.
Helluva update dude.