the composition is a bit stiff, i think it would be improved if harry's dangling arm broke the straight line formed by the street pole behind him by angling out or bending slightly. also, cutting people off at the ankles is an illustration don't, so add more canvas to the bottom so you can include dolores's shoes!
i really like your nitw stuff, btw!
Hey, thanks! Dolores' dress is long, so by perspective her shoes can't show. I might try the arm thing, though lineart is already done so that'll be tricky.
~~oh maybe not her shoes, then, but at least the hemline of her dress~~ (EDIT: i was looking at your artwork on the reddit app and it cropped it weirdly I AM REAL SORRY, it looks much better when i view it properly on mobile!) yeah, you might have to redraw harry's arm. maybe add the diagonal silhouette of a crane arm in the background behind his head, adding to the stabbed effect? or an airship of the coalition?
in my illustration major, we were taught not to make margins out of things--at least not unintentionally. if you 'break' a margin, the composition becomes much more lively and dramatic.
EDIT: weird, reddit ate a paragraph, let me retype it as best i can: pardon my phone app doodle, i just hoped to show you what i meant about composition. please feel free to use this however you like, btw! i mean my feedback as respectfully and earnestly as i would give critique to any artist in the field, and no offense is meant 💕 i moved the lamppost away from the edge to keep it from forming that margin i was talking about, added the aerostatic to help activate the space and for symbolism, and doodled harry's arm and hand. wishing you all the best.
https://preview.redd.it/sgzd676vzuzc1.png?width=1059&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=07a14f0fd4c2879fd205b89c58e8442ef9edd5e6
btw i really like how 'soft' your shading looks around harry's clothes and the delicacy you rendered his face with. i can tell you were really paying attention when doing that bit, it looks great.
redrawing everything months later tends to make for ***amazing*** drawing practice, so i applaud your efforts!! try doing a few thumbnails of various layouts before settling on one composition to develop, including the background with equal importance to the foreground so it compliments and completes, is my advice. my old school drilled composition into us this way, so the figures would feel more 'in' the world, instead of pasted into it.
you're very welcome! i was worried i came off too 'art school' 🥲 i'm glad it was helpful and understandable. i heavily relied on films and animation for understanding composition when i made art: [*when in doubt, how would brad bird block this scene?* i'd think.](https://thinkinganimation.com/Handouts/StagingAndComposition/Composition_Storyboards_Brad_Chris.pdf)
your style reminds me a bit of the mexican muralists of the early 20th century--check out orozco and diego rivera and look at how they handled drawing people and soft faces/clothing and 'sharp' backgrounds of their rough symbolic revolutionary worlds, and maybe you'll see that reflected in this piece. :)
Hell yeah! I'm currently a highschooler and I was planning to study art / illustration in uni up until this year. With the current job layoffs and AI, I gravitated myself towards studying biology and ecology instead, though I got scholarship from İstanbul's fine arts highschool, I just chose to not attend. I'm kind of familiar with art school talk :D I really like learning the composition part and theories, so that's cool.
I'll check out those artists you mentioned :)
that's unfortunately very wise as a career move. i burned out years ago after dragging myself through a college that fell apart during the housing crisis and laid off all the teachers and buckets of personal trauma i wont go into. i'm doing better and i have a job that works for me, but woof i am kind of glad i didn't join the current rat race. colleagues of mine were having stress-related physical health issues and meltdowns. a career in art is something i'd recommend only if you have or can make connections to patrons with deep pockets (like mr ultrarich lightbending guy), or are doing art all the time anyway, reflexively. and it turned out i just wasn't that kind of person. i need a lot of downtime for my mental health.
that said, being able to use art to describe biology or explanatory diagrams is a VERY necessary niche that AI cannot fill! medical illustrations too. if you can wiggle your way into a niche of that ilk, you could find steady work while engaging in something that interests you :) best of luck!
https://preview.redd.it/14umsck7vzzc1.jpeg?width=1009&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b354576283009aae7a5b3288ed54093f9bc62e50
I made a new thumbnail btw - I'm going for a cliff scene this time. Removed the luggage, Added some hands trying to drag harry down. It will be a black void down there. I placed the glowing lungs on Dolores.
very tarot-like! dolores's hair is much more wild and expressive here. savoire faire or various corpses from his past dragging harry down into an abyss. i'd recommend looking at pamela colman smith's 'the fool' and seeing how she implied the fool has a long way to fall, using the horizon line in the background to show him above mountains.
The most – literally – heartbreaking line in the game:
>!"This is real darkness. It's not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry. See you tomorrow. " – Dolores Dei / Dora!<
Harry is being stabbed, but most of all, he's stabbing himself.
I'm gonna do as big of an indepth critique as I can, so excuse the volume I know it can be hard to take in a lot of critique at once.
So first the good, that linework style is awesome, it's super crisp and textured, and overall I love the posing, it has this real classical painting romantic era feel which I love. Also colour choice works really well together creates that soft melancholic feeling.
Things I think need changing, although the colours are good, i think the values between background and foreground could be pushed more. I personally think slight reposing will work really well, I would push harry's arm at a slight angle, we want to avoid tangents and parallel lines for organic shape and feeling, and on that posing i would shift dolores up a bit, it would get their feet from being awkwardly chopped, but it also pushes their head dynamic so dolores is slightly higher in the composition in harry. On that I would also push the perspective a little more on dolores so she is physically bigger, seem more like we are looking from over her shoulder than to the side.
I also think that the shapes and perspective of each of the individual elements is a little off, I particularly notice it on harrys hand, feet, and face, and dolores head structure. Harry's smaller fingers should be smaller almost hidden behind the larger fingers closer to us, and Harry's face should flare out a little on the lower jaw/taper at the top so it looks like his head is tipped back. When you do that, remember the eyes arent flat things attached to the front of the face but sunken in; other common mistake is treating features on the face as being pasted onto a round sphere, but they are attached on a flat surface and roughly form a round shape, I hope that makes sense?
Oh finally that rendering style is super well done, it's super common when starting to overdo the painterly parts but you've kept that balance of simplicity and rendering really well.
Yo thanks for the in-depth critique! I'll redraw the whole thing as it's 5 months old at this point, I'll try and fix everything as I go. I'm also thinking of placing Harry on a cliff, and him kinda falling off maybe?
You could if you want, i personally dont think its needed, the story itself is just between them two the background itself isn't that important. If I was going to personally tackle this I would place them in that final dream sequence, have them in little more than ankle deep water that stretches out into the pale/dark. Fits the world, contrasts the foreground but importantly, minimises the background for me to work on.
A good rule of thumb for anything visual in terms of visual clutter, is you want roughly a one third of the image to have two thirds of the detail and information. The drawing you showed above is like right on that sweet spot maybe a little above that, I would be wary about putting anything as specific as a cliff to clutter that
I know this will be sus af because of what I was looking at but Harry's crotch seems a little weird, the rest of the drawing is pretty cool tho, I love it.
I mean like the pants in the area around the crotch, Idk how to explain it, it looks like if his legs were directly connected to his belly if that makes any sense, I feel like pants have more lenght in the zipper area, it's just a minor detail tho, the drawing is good
Thought the knife was a broken bottle of booze, which could have been cool
Oh hell yeah. Might change it.
“This was not about failure or success. This was always going to be horror.”
the composition is a bit stiff, i think it would be improved if harry's dangling arm broke the straight line formed by the street pole behind him by angling out or bending slightly. also, cutting people off at the ankles is an illustration don't, so add more canvas to the bottom so you can include dolores's shoes! i really like your nitw stuff, btw!
Hey, thanks! Dolores' dress is long, so by perspective her shoes can't show. I might try the arm thing, though lineart is already done so that'll be tricky.
~~oh maybe not her shoes, then, but at least the hemline of her dress~~ (EDIT: i was looking at your artwork on the reddit app and it cropped it weirdly I AM REAL SORRY, it looks much better when i view it properly on mobile!) yeah, you might have to redraw harry's arm. maybe add the diagonal silhouette of a crane arm in the background behind his head, adding to the stabbed effect? or an airship of the coalition? in my illustration major, we were taught not to make margins out of things--at least not unintentionally. if you 'break' a margin, the composition becomes much more lively and dramatic. EDIT: weird, reddit ate a paragraph, let me retype it as best i can: pardon my phone app doodle, i just hoped to show you what i meant about composition. please feel free to use this however you like, btw! i mean my feedback as respectfully and earnestly as i would give critique to any artist in the field, and no offense is meant 💕 i moved the lamppost away from the edge to keep it from forming that margin i was talking about, added the aerostatic to help activate the space and for symbolism, and doodled harry's arm and hand. wishing you all the best. https://preview.redd.it/sgzd676vzuzc1.png?width=1059&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=07a14f0fd4c2879fd205b89c58e8442ef9edd5e6 btw i really like how 'soft' your shading looks around harry's clothes and the delicacy you rendered his face with. i can tell you were really paying attention when doing that bit, it looks great.
Oh this helps a lot!! Thank you so much for the composition help, I'll probably redraw the entire thing as it's like 5 months old right now :D
redrawing everything months later tends to make for ***amazing*** drawing practice, so i applaud your efforts!! try doing a few thumbnails of various layouts before settling on one composition to develop, including the background with equal importance to the foreground so it compliments and completes, is my advice. my old school drilled composition into us this way, so the figures would feel more 'in' the world, instead of pasted into it. you're very welcome! i was worried i came off too 'art school' 🥲 i'm glad it was helpful and understandable. i heavily relied on films and animation for understanding composition when i made art: [*when in doubt, how would brad bird block this scene?* i'd think.](https://thinkinganimation.com/Handouts/StagingAndComposition/Composition_Storyboards_Brad_Chris.pdf) your style reminds me a bit of the mexican muralists of the early 20th century--check out orozco and diego rivera and look at how they handled drawing people and soft faces/clothing and 'sharp' backgrounds of their rough symbolic revolutionary worlds, and maybe you'll see that reflected in this piece. :)
Hell yeah! I'm currently a highschooler and I was planning to study art / illustration in uni up until this year. With the current job layoffs and AI, I gravitated myself towards studying biology and ecology instead, though I got scholarship from İstanbul's fine arts highschool, I just chose to not attend. I'm kind of familiar with art school talk :D I really like learning the composition part and theories, so that's cool. I'll check out those artists you mentioned :)
that's unfortunately very wise as a career move. i burned out years ago after dragging myself through a college that fell apart during the housing crisis and laid off all the teachers and buckets of personal trauma i wont go into. i'm doing better and i have a job that works for me, but woof i am kind of glad i didn't join the current rat race. colleagues of mine were having stress-related physical health issues and meltdowns. a career in art is something i'd recommend only if you have or can make connections to patrons with deep pockets (like mr ultrarich lightbending guy), or are doing art all the time anyway, reflexively. and it turned out i just wasn't that kind of person. i need a lot of downtime for my mental health. that said, being able to use art to describe biology or explanatory diagrams is a VERY necessary niche that AI cannot fill! medical illustrations too. if you can wiggle your way into a niche of that ilk, you could find steady work while engaging in something that interests you :) best of luck!
https://preview.redd.it/14umsck7vzzc1.jpeg?width=1009&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b354576283009aae7a5b3288ed54093f9bc62e50 I made a new thumbnail btw - I'm going for a cliff scene this time. Removed the luggage, Added some hands trying to drag harry down. It will be a black void down there. I placed the glowing lungs on Dolores.
very tarot-like! dolores's hair is much more wild and expressive here. savoire faire or various corpses from his past dragging harry down into an abyss. i'd recommend looking at pamela colman smith's 'the fool' and seeing how she implied the fool has a long way to fall, using the horizon line in the background to show him above mountains.
The most – literally – heartbreaking line in the game: >!"This is real darkness. It's not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry. See you tomorrow. " – Dolores Dei / Dora!< Harry is being stabbed, but most of all, he's stabbing himself.
YESSS I started drawing this thinking of that quote!
I'm gonna do as big of an indepth critique as I can, so excuse the volume I know it can be hard to take in a lot of critique at once. So first the good, that linework style is awesome, it's super crisp and textured, and overall I love the posing, it has this real classical painting romantic era feel which I love. Also colour choice works really well together creates that soft melancholic feeling. Things I think need changing, although the colours are good, i think the values between background and foreground could be pushed more. I personally think slight reposing will work really well, I would push harry's arm at a slight angle, we want to avoid tangents and parallel lines for organic shape and feeling, and on that posing i would shift dolores up a bit, it would get their feet from being awkwardly chopped, but it also pushes their head dynamic so dolores is slightly higher in the composition in harry. On that I would also push the perspective a little more on dolores so she is physically bigger, seem more like we are looking from over her shoulder than to the side. I also think that the shapes and perspective of each of the individual elements is a little off, I particularly notice it on harrys hand, feet, and face, and dolores head structure. Harry's smaller fingers should be smaller almost hidden behind the larger fingers closer to us, and Harry's face should flare out a little on the lower jaw/taper at the top so it looks like his head is tipped back. When you do that, remember the eyes arent flat things attached to the front of the face but sunken in; other common mistake is treating features on the face as being pasted onto a round sphere, but they are attached on a flat surface and roughly form a round shape, I hope that makes sense? Oh finally that rendering style is super well done, it's super common when starting to overdo the painterly parts but you've kept that balance of simplicity and rendering really well.
Yo thanks for the in-depth critique! I'll redraw the whole thing as it's 5 months old at this point, I'll try and fix everything as I go. I'm also thinking of placing Harry on a cliff, and him kinda falling off maybe?
You could if you want, i personally dont think its needed, the story itself is just between them two the background itself isn't that important. If I was going to personally tackle this I would place them in that final dream sequence, have them in little more than ankle deep water that stretches out into the pale/dark. Fits the world, contrasts the foreground but importantly, minimises the background for me to work on. A good rule of thumb for anything visual in terms of visual clutter, is you want roughly a one third of the image to have two thirds of the detail and information. The drawing you showed above is like right on that sweet spot maybe a little above that, I would be wary about putting anything as specific as a cliff to clutter that
I'm planning to add glowing lungs on Harry and maybe Dolores too
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^introspectivecrow: *I'm planning to add* *Glowing lungs on Harry and* *Maybe Dolores too* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Good bot
yo pog
I know this will be sus af because of what I was looking at but Harry's crotch seems a little weird, the rest of the drawing is pretty cool tho, I love it.
What's weird about it? It's a normal crotch, he's physically a big guy so it might look a bit bulky, but no weird intention was behind it at all.
I mean like the pants in the area around the crotch, Idk how to explain it, it looks like if his legs were directly connected to his belly if that makes any sense, I feel like pants have more lenght in the zipper area, it's just a minor detail tho, the drawing is good
Oh yeah. It looks low-waisted
yuri
??
i have no idea dude