raijin

[sandywaterfalls]

for some reason i thought she could have like dispreportionatly small hands and feet. anyway. they'd be kind of like the snow ladies hands...but anyways. let me know lol!!!

again, feel free to mix and match all

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[sandywaterfalls]

line and color basic any changes can be made

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[Maugh]

Feedback!

Hands are good, hair is good, pose is good. The hair color is a little pastel, and working this pale, may make it difficult to do highlights.

Biggest problem, though is the billow on the dress. Similar to the Raijin, the way that it billows doesn't qutie look right. I realize that this could be greatly improved through the coloring process, but the form doesn't seem quite right in the lines.

Unfortunately, I look up billowing dress, and I just get a lot of marilyn monroe pictures. Heh.

http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/car ... ge_640.jpg

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/ ... 3i6os9.jpg
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/ ... 4saqyo.jpg
http://cache.desktopnexus.com/thumbnail ... mbnail.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HhoE7RUhk7E/T ... +dress.jpg

Also, I talked about the eyes in the Vulcanic post. Same thing applies. Drop the irises, maybe, a littel less human. They might be a little too close together. Also, ears. I don't know exactly what it is about the ears that bugs me, but they do a bit.

Anyway, thanks for your work,

-Rob

[sandywaterfalls]

with her and the vulcanic, a dark background looks best. i did some layers that aren't currently visable underneath that will help the effects stand out on a light background. any whos. yah haha!

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[Maugh]

The folds are much better. Great work.

I totally agree with the dark background. That was the case with a lot of the high-effects characters that I've colored. However, keep in mind that the book doesn't have a dark background except on very specific spreads. In the past, what we've had to do is paint a little extra gray behind those kinds of images. It's tricky, to make that work with the book. That doesn't meant that you should stop using the effects, they look great, but if you can keep them on a separate layer so that we can do some finageling to make it look right, then that will make our lives much easier. I'm assuming you're already doing that, but it's just an FYI.

The folds look a lot better on these, I realize that some of that is just the highlighting that allows you do to do that. I do have one more quick edit with this one. The solid black fill on the interior of the sleeves comes out as really strong, and is a little jarring. That kind of inking can definitely work, (and is really, really common in comics,) but that's an entire style that would need to be consistent, which we haven't really done. The interior should probably be colored normally heavy shadow, rather than inked black. I'm referring to the sleeves, and the far right and left of the dress, as well as the bottom of the center-dress.

Still, nice work on the lightning. The bright white highlighting on this one helped.



As a side note, (NOT a requested edit, but more of a minor critique) It looks like you do a really good job in selecting locations for your highlights, but the overall contrast maybe is a little too subtle. Referring to the black-to-white scale as a spectrum of 100 to 0%, with 0 being white and 100% being totally black, it seems like your comfort level is mostly in the 0-20 range for colors, light colors and pastels, then 100% black for the deep lines and shadows. Line art should always be the 100% black, because that's the style that we're using, but if you were to deepen shadows overall so that you're working in the 20-60% range more often, then you might get a little more variety in the contrast.

Hope that makes sense. I'll try to explain it a little better. Another way to look at it is to open the jpg of this image in photoshop, open the Image > adjustments > levels menu, from the upper toolbar. It will show you a sort of spectrogram of the b/w scale, and you should see a heavy spike on the far left, (your line art,) A heavy spike at about halfway across, (which is your gray background), and then relatively lower concentrations of colors, all from about halfway across to the white side.

(Image here:)

Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 6.34.23 PM.png

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The higher concentration on the right side of the spectrogram shows the consistency of brightness that you use. If you grab that center control triangle thingie below that spectrogram, and pull it a little to the right, you can see what it would look like if you used a little more variation in the darkness of your colors.

(image here:)

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Deeper gray in her shirt, deeper skin-tone, more vivid yellow, deeper purple. As a side-effect, it also made the background deeper, which isn't important, since that will be different in the book, but you can see how the better contrast between the very light lights and the average tones and the very dark darks, makes the image stand out a little more. In the initial number example, that would be black/average/white of 100%/50%/0%, rather than 100%/20%/0%. It makes sense in my head, I hope I'm communicating effectively.

Anyway, messing with the levels (or curves, if you're Aubrey and understand all of that stuff better than I do,) is one way of adjusting this, (coincidentally, that's how a lot of photo-correction is done,) but back in my area of experience, the way that I would try that is to simply use deeper colors for flatting, (80-50%, in the number analogy) and much lighter colors, (30-10% range) for highlights.


To make a really long story short, If you use deeper, darker colors for your flats, you'll get a better contrast in your pictures. The temptation is to flat in mid-tones, when it is actually more effective to flat in shadow colors.

Example Images. Hope this clarifies.
Bright:

Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 6.48.57 PM.png

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High Contrast:

Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 6.47.12 PM.png

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I personally much prefer the second option, although I realize that color range is also an artistic choice.


Anyway, hope that was useful. If you have any questions please let me know. That was more meant to be helpful than critique-ey.

As a final note, I really dig the lighting done on her gray skirt. That turned out really well. The painted look is nice.

[sandywaterfalls]

great feedback!! I always appreciate it. heres it with those edits.
yah there's an adjustment layer called "brightness contrast" that works really well for that. That and curves but I use brightness and contrast more. any whos. So here I just added another adjustment layer. on this and the vulcanic I have a lyer that says " background for book" or " flames visability" at the bottom of the layers that you can turn on and it helps them to look nice on a light background. you just get rid of the gray background layers. but i have the 50 percent gray backgrounds on there for show but you can delete em anywhos. any other edits let me know.

lighning.jpg

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