I would appreciate constructive criticism on this artwork

[npc]

Hello! I’m new here and am excited to be joining.
I’ve recently drawn this picture (I challenged myself a bit with the composition and background), but somehow don’t like it. I’ve spent a lot of time on it but when I look at it I can’t exactly pinpoint why I dislike it so much. Maybe the colours are too muddy? The perspective off? It’s too crowded?

I’d appreciate some opinions on what could be changed to make larger pieces like this look better, because I plan on drawing these characters again in the future, and would love to actually enjoy the picture.

A big thank you in advance!

[Pfblakeney]

Here’s my two cents:
I’ve been a lineart only artist for a while, and I struggle with painting and coloring as well. I would suggest including some lineart elements in the foregrounds and background areas, especially the bush in the foreground. I think that would help the painting and lineart elements blend together better.
Edit: That sky is a good piece of work. I enjoy it very much.
Hope this helps!

[npc]

Thank you for the suggestion! Normally I also go full lineart with everything, but I feel like I always see people do more of a painterly styled background and then use lineart for the focus of the painting, and it always looks so lovely. Maybe my version didn’t fully work in that way though. But I should try a full lineart background, I might like it more than I think! Thanks again

[MangooSalade]

It looks great!.

Something I notice is that the bird in the top left leads my eye up left and off the page. You don’t want that I think. It is possibly the colour contrast that draws my eye. The girl is low contrast and much less noticeable - which is kind of a cool thing, but relies on me looking back into the picture and hunting around. Consider whether you could reduce the draw of the bird, and adjust the statue so there is more of a leading line to the girl.
For me the roses are very contrasty, seem to be the same colour as the sky and are a distraction from the rest of the image. My mind wants them to be darker on the left and right and bright as they are around the statue.

It’s good that it makes me wonder what the girl has lost because that means the picture tells a story and has me thinking. I feel like the thing in the statue’s upper hand should relate to what the girl has lost or is worried about. For instance if it was a mirror instead of a bird she might be worried about her looks.

Consider that you have put some bright rim lighting on the girl but not the stattue. I feel that this makes the statue very matt. In my mind there would be rim light on the upper left.

Just some thoughts, and it’s also great the way it is.

[YRH]

Hey, welcome!

Wow, that’s a great piece! I would call it “ambitious”, because there’s a lot of intricate detail.

Hmm I’m not too experienced or skilled (yet…? ), so take what I say with a grain of salt, but here are my observations:

• colors indeed feel very warm and orange, so maybe there’s too little contrast? Perhaps some shadows should be deeper (especially self-shadows / occlusion)
• the composition feels very static and grounded, which I think would work better if the statue was the only subject
• not sure if there are any rules for it, but it doesn’t feel right to put the other character in the very corner. I think they would need much more space to the edge of the image, at least. Due to this, maybe it’s difficult to say who’s the “star” of this painting, should it be the girl or the statue? I think a good strategy is to make your subject as big as possible (close up / cropped), but with two subjects its not really doable.

Again, it’s a lovely work, I hope to see more from you in the future

[Michelist]

I have no problems with the painterly representation of your work, in my eyes it fits perfectly.
But one thing that kept my eye on it for a while was the statue, which took me a while to realize that it was impossible in stone, as the choice of color suggests. The free “flying” clothes are almost impossible to make, but suppose it were stone, the first storm could break off the belts, a falling branch or children playing and trying to climb the statue, the flying shirt. In this case, a bronze statue would have to be chosen as realistically durable.
So, nonetheless, I like it.

Michelist

[jastx]

FAT POST INCOMING, I apologise T_T

Your work looks great!! I especially love love looove the sky.
The feedback so far is also really good.
My question is whether you wanted the bird to be the focal point, because you have the circle shape around it (with the sky and trees) that traps the eye in there, not to mention the higher values in that area.

If you look at your painting in black and white (I normally do this with a pure black fill layer set to saturation mode - all my paintings have one of these sitting at the top), you can see that the main contrast areas are 1 and 2, where everything in 2 is glomped together due to lack of contrast.

What this means is there is little separation between the background, midground and foreground elements.

I tried my hand at a paintover, not everything is right but I hope you like(?) it. I’m no pro, so it’s a bit rough:

(forgive me for my airbrush sins, my tablet has decided to go on strike for some reason so I used my mouse…)

Thumbnails (before vs. after):

Maybe the big fat shadow on the statue as it blocks the light is not the brightest idea known to man, but I thought it helped lend some contrast to the brightened character.
Additionally, I added a few god rays to direct the eyes towards the character.
If you notice the blur on the front bush, that is because I thought it could use less detail to act as a contrast to everything else, defining it as the foreground (since i couldn’t really make it any darker).

That’s it for the composition, now I will talk about lighting and colour.
I noticed that the atmospheric fog thing (how the sky eats up mountains in the distance when you look over a mountain range in real life) is missing. The sky is a big fat light and objects reflect it, with the fog thing making objects have less value variation in the distance. It can be very important for defining your back/mid/foregrounds.
I added some of that to reduce the amount of value in the rose bushes in the background, so that the eyes are less distracted by it.

I agree with MangooSalade that the roses being the same colour as the sky is distracting, so I changed them to a red with a darker value to make them pop less.
Everything being quite warm is not a massive problem as long as you include other forms of contrast too.

I think that covers everything from me
Your artwork is seriously very good and it will definitely be a major stepping stone in your art improvement journey, especially since you’ve noticed that some thing feels ‘off’. Your ability to convey a story and make the viewer feel something can’t be understated!
Don’t beat yourself up over anything, there’s too much to learn in this field!

Hope this helped! ^^

---

Edit: I also want to mention, there is a contrast with the amount of space around the statue compared to the character in the corner (the technical people call it negative space right?). That also contributes to the focus being more on the statue and bird than the character.
The character seems to have no room to breathe, compared to the statue. Symbolic, but it depends on if that’s what you want!

The aim of my paintover was to put some more focus on the character, which is why I made the changes I did.

[mmiller]

The drawing is beautiful, congrats!
I just think the two figures need more space and also a little highlight to differentiate them from the background.
So I made this rough ‘montage’ to explain (sorry)

(translate by goooogle)

[Typhoon]

It’s a beautiful piece and I see you have gotten plenty of great feedback regarding how you could alter this artwork so I wont make my comment too long. I think the main issue is that the painting is quite warm and almost monochromatic (besides sky). I think a cold light source could add some contrast to the piece. Also if you ever want to continue this specific painting I would suggest some variation in the vegetation, especially those warm green roses. Regardless of these points though I think you have done a great job, I totally love this painting!

[TaleOfACat]

While this is a great artwork already above my own level, especially considering the anatomy and line art, there may be some advice I can still add:

I think if the picture “feels wrong” for you, it is probably not about the details, but overall concepts, mood, colours, contrast etc.

The one thing that stands out for me, and was also mentioned by Typhoon in a way, is the sky colour versus the colour of the light and shadows. The sky is a rather cool greenish-turquoise tone, and seems rather cloudy, not suggesting too much sunlight. Yet the pillar and the human character seem to be hit by warm and directional sunlight (much less the top of the statue though). Even if that would work out (the sun being outside of the frame in some cloud gap), at least the shadows might be lit by the cooler greenish tone of the sky. So maybe play around a bit with the colour of light and shadows and see if it makes the picture feel more consistent.

Another thing that was also mentioned already, is the fragile structures of the statue not really fitting the material. Now in a fantasy setting this might not matter, but as there is no magic sparkles around, maybe our realism detector kicks in.

Last but not least, you could work on the foliage. It is pretty obvious that some brush was used for that - a little more hand painting could cover that up nicely. Some branches maybe, and a few dark spots within the brightest leaves.
Also, as some of the overpaintings already showed, you might want to lower contrast of the front left foreground (blur it?) and maybe also of the background. So that there is a clear focus on the main subject, and more of a 3D effect.

Now with all that being said, do not forget this is a very nice picture. If your wish for critique had not forced me to look closely, I would probably not have been bothered by those fine details at all. Please do not be too harsh on yourself.

By the way, the amount and quality of constructive critique in this thread is amazing.

[Lynx3d]

Interesting to see others ideas, though jastx’ changes are quite drasatic.

I agree with TaleOfACat that the color contrast between the turqoise sky and the warm ambient light is too unnatural. And as others said, the statue definitely needs more shadow contrast.

Interestingly, I would go the opposite way as jastx and tune down the sky brightness a it, and instead light up the statue some, so the extreme contrast doesn’t pulls your attention away from the main character so much. This dark looming statue makes it a bit eerie, I’d imagine the statue giving the scene something warm and gentle…

I do like the idea of blurring that bush in the front a bit, though.

I was hesitant to post an edited version, but since others already did:

I tried to not change it too drastically. Basically, I started with reducing some red in shadows and midtones of the foreground, and added a touch of blue to the shadows. In the sky, I took out some of the green, slightly increased contrast, and added a touch of warmth to the clouds.
Then Added some shadow contrast to the statue.

[npc]

The focus really wasn’t meant to be on the bird, but I suppose I got so lost in the details that I didn’t notice that. I might have tried to put to much into one picture here. The contrast of the roses being too distinct is definitely a good point too, thank you!

[npc]

Thank you for your opinion and the compliment! Next time I’ll be sure to work on understanding the colours I want to use better and I like the idea of maybe having only the statue in a separate picture.

[Deevad]

Hey @npc , amazing line-art, designs, and character expressions.

As I saw many replies with paint-over here, and I was curious what would be my own way to play with it:

What I did is mainly to cut out the silhouette from the background, by values and by color temperature (cold vs warm), and added a quick rim light on the left.

All in all, very interesting to read all the answers and paint-over here.

[npc]

The website has advised me to reply to everyone in one reply, so I’ll try doing that:

@Michelist That’s a valid thing to consider, I hadn’t thought of how unrealistic this would be as a stone statue. I like the idea of making it bronze, thank you!

@jastx I wanna go ahead and thank you so much for how much work you’ve put into showing me what you meant and taking time out of your day to make these changes! I absolutely love how the statue looks with the darker contrast, it immediately makes this picture much more pleasant to look at for me. I actually always do the same thing (Saturation layer with black) but it seems I’ve missed just how intensely the brighter area floods together this time. The blurring of the bush in the front looks fantastic as well, just like the differently coloured roses and “foggy” background. This was an immense help!

@mmiller I like the symmetry of the pillars, it puts more emphasis on the characters. Thanks for making this!

@Typhoon I normally only do shadows and leave the lighter parts the same as the base colouring (with few exceptions like the hair), actually using differently coloured colder and warmer tones might help a lot, thank you! I was afraid it’d get too busy with lots of diffrent vegetation but this was pointed out by another comment as well, so I think thats a really good idea.

@TaleOfACat I was trying to find a quicker way to get those leaves in and a brush seemed perfect for it. I used to draw every leave by itself, doing lineart and shading for every leave and plant, but it took way to much time, so I tried something different and less time-consuming. But it seems I still have to learn how to properly use such shortcuts. I like the idea of some manual hand painting over it! Less time used, but still a little better looking! Thank you.

@Lynx3d This version looks lovely as well! What I’ve gotten from all this wonderful feedback is that the statue and the sky need the most work. I also like the colours a lot better, even if the adjustment is minimal, it just feels right, thank you so much!

@Deevad The rim light looks really good and the lighter background really lets the characters stand out! Thank you for the compliments and taking time to do a paint over, it looks lovely.

I didn’t expect so much wonderful criticism, and definitely didn’t think so many people would come to help me, I wanna thank everyone again and am really thankful for all these fantastic suggestions!!

[Typhoon]

Your art is really cool! Good luck with this character and illustration, I hope you share more of your works here in the future as well!

[TaleOfACat]

@npc

But it seems I still have to learn how to properly use such shortcuts. I like the idea of some manual hand painting over it! Less time used, but still a little better looking!

A great way to learn this or get inspiration is looking for speedpainting tutorials with forests in them, like this one:

SAI Speedpaint | The Forest Stray

And one you’ll find by searching for “forest speedpainting #2” (by vesner).
(2nd has not the best video quality because it used to be an adobe flash video, but it is one I used myself. As new user, the forum blocked me from posting 2 links.)

These are not made with Krita, but the same concepts apply here - and if anything the Krita brushes are even more powerful.

[npc]

I’ll definitely check those videos out, thanks!

[Alex_Russell]

When I first looked at the painting I didn’t realize the central figure was a statue. As others have pointed out, a statue cannot be physically made like that, but the key thing is the colour of the statue and the pillar on the far right are not different enough from the rest of the foreground to say “I am stone”.

Really like the clouds, and bushes. Might make the central figure stand out a bit more, maybe by desaturating the bushes a bit.

You should be quite happy with this result.

[npc]

Thanks! Maybe I could’ve pulled up a few reference pictures of statues, instead of just free handing it. (Expecially seeing how this was my first time attempting to draw a statue)