SourCherryJack's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Orange Shock]

Great color choice on this one!

BastianConst responds:

Thank-you :D

[The Red Horror Rebuilt]

So I'm finally getting around to your request, sorry for the delay. I'm just going to leave it on this submission, but I'm looking at a lot of what you've submitted.

I don't know what your long term art goals are, so I'm going to give you fairly general tips on how to improve. If I'm off the mark in any of my assumptions on what you're shooting for, sorry but it's what I got. The impression that I get from your work is that it is very much couched in darker sci-fi and comic art. You're at a point in your art where it looks like you're breaking into more complex forms and figures. I read on your page that you're self taught and it looks like you're kind of jumping into the deep end with the character design; and that is fine. However, if you are looking to maximize your learning efficiency the best thing you can do is really work on your fundamentals. It is boring work at times and can feel like a grind, but render some shapes. Sit there and draw from life, work on depicting 3D shapes on the paper or screen. Work on pumping up your contrast and value range. Do simple perspective studies in one, two and three point perspectives, and then shade the blocks in with single and multiple light sources.
This is the fastest way to improve. It takes a lot of work still, but that's how you min-max on art skills.
Now to more targeted and immediate feedback. You use a lot of black, gray, and red in your work, but it's all very muted and tempered. In illustration, particularly comic art, the more contrast you can pump the better. If you've ever watched the Spawn animated series from the 90's that is a great example of using a lot of black against stronger lightsources to create visual interest. Do not be afraid to bathe your characters and scenes in black ink.
Looking at some of your colored work (the zombie patient, melty-face etc) and your approach is pretty simple with the color. Try utilizing a series of reds greens yellows, even some violets. Really look at face references and study what colors are present.

The robot hanging here is also too perfect, he needs surface imperfections and points of shadow should get a lot darker. look at how painted metal looks in real life, any sharp edges are likely to have a lot of paint peeled off, and there's scratches, finger prints, smudges etc even on very polished metal. Don't be afraid of really pumping up the sharpness of the edges in your shading. A hole a lot of new artists fall into is thinking it's more realistic to have very soft shading and transitions from dark to light at all times, when it just makes everything look more fluffy.

You're very much at the beginning of your art journey, I can go on forever and throw a mountain of links, concepts and tutorials at you, but what you really need to do is just draw. Draw every day; and challenge yourself often. Don't be let down if you fall short of your mental vision of what the drawing was supposed to look like, don't get discouraged from lack of visible improvement. Draw from life, use references, study fundamentals, and draw what you want. Everything you draw is helping you to improve in some way.

Dilopho-Mos responds:

Holy shit, thank you. I actually thought you had missed my request but this really makes me happy. I can't thank you enough for stopping by and telling me which parts I should work on. Thank you so much.

[DJ Subatomic Supernova]

Sick colors and forms on this one dude!

[cherries]

I find these pleasing for the soul.

[Circle Portrait]

Loving those textures my man

DieterTheuns responds:

no, YOU'RE breathtaking

[vacuum order cover 2]

Okay right off the bat, split this into four separate pieces. The length of this post isn't helping anything and even if these four illustrations were sequential and told a story the format is too long to read in any clear way. Presentation of your art is almost as important as the actual art itself, so always try present art in a way that benefits the pieces themselves.

For starters you need to work on anatomy; the clarity of the action of your characters is held back in some instances by anatomical issues that sort of muddy what is happening (particularly in the first scene and the bottom scene). I like that you're putting these characters in very dynamic poses and situations, your ambition is good, and over time you will pick up better anatomy if you keep at it; so don't worry too much about that aspect of it. But definitely keep in mind that you should be working at it.
Your use of line of action isn't quite there either, this is part of anatomy and knowing what poses suit the character and the action of the character. This is most noticeable in the red girl with the scythe swinging it. Her pose and the motion on the scythe are not flowing together, creating something of a disconnect. Same with the orange dude in the bottom. There should be a single line of action that flows consistently through the pose of the character into the weapon they're swinging. Only being disrupted if they're being hit or at the point of impact on their target. Look up videos and stills of martial artists and dancers, if you do enough research you can find a lot of action poses to use as references for combat poses. Working from reference is absolutely vital to learning anatomy.

As I mentioned earlier, you're tackling a lot in all of these scenes, which is fine, but I recommend you get a sketchbook and do a lot of more focused studies. Work on anatomy, and also ways to communicate depth. It's not a lot of fun to do, but set up some basic blocks and draw what you see and work on rendering. If want to draw scenes with lots of action and multiple characters you need to learn to communicate distance in a 3D space and how distort it as well.

As for color, my first instinct would be to say ignore that for now and work on more fundamental aspects of art before getting into color.
I will say though, that your color choice isn't bad by any means, but your implementation of the color is a bit too much. You're hitting very high saturation for every part of every scene. It's better to have areas that are less saturated to create more visual interest in the parts that are saturated, it also helps guide the eye through the action by acting like a highlighter. If everything is highlighted how does the eye know where to go?
Your value scale is actually pretty good overall. When I convert this to black and white the scenes become much more legible and less busy. There are some areas where a little more or a little less contrast would be ideal, but it's solid.
The last point I want to make is on the intent of your brush strokes. This is a little difficult to explain; but on elements like the energy beams and blasts and fog effects, I want you to consider how intentional are you being when making them? As they are, the brush you're using to make them looks to be doing the most when informing their shape, form and look. This creates a weird sort of collage effect, that I don't think you're looking for in your work. So you have these characters that you've drawn yourself mixed in with these effects that are partially you, but mostly the program. My advice is to do everything in your drawing with linework. If you want smoke, draw the lines to make smoke clouds. If you want lasers, draw in the lasers yourself. This will give your work better cohesion overall.
A few things you should also look into:
The Gestalt Principles
Posemaniacs (website)
line-of-action (website)
Hope that helps, any questions or clarifications, pm me.

[My Pale Hand Pet]

Love everything about this one man! The concept, design, colors just every bit of it is awesome.

AntonM responds:

Cheers Jack! Glad you like it dude :)

[Wizard Chess]

Sick colors!
Also I recognize that dragon dood.

[Y is this rotated?]

This is a problem that occasionally pops up when uploading from photos from phones.
To fix it open the file in a photo editing progam, MS Paint works, and rotate and scale it accordingly, crop it and then 'save as' a different file name. It should fix the issue.

BryceLydick responds:

Thx for the info

[00080]

Really fun illustration, I love the details and grodiness of the monster, and you've got a really good range of values on the guy too. Also he is framed really well with the dark mass behind him.

The big thing holding this piece back though is the presentation. Just cropping it and getting that pen out of the frame would put the focus on the art itself without any extraneous clutter,
The focus should be on the art, not on the utensils.
That being said the bright yellow at the top does look really nice with the dark blue, but being that its so divorced from the piece itself it's not being used to its full potential. Maybe pulling that yellow in to frame the monster, or to fill in the white circles on the dark mass would help in bringing it all together more. The little scribbles around should also be gotten rid of, in ms paint you can just crop some of the surrounding paper and copy/paste it over, if you don't have Photoshop or a better photo editing program.

Your work is really good, well rendered and framed all around, and it deserves the best presentation you can give it. Spending that extra time to get a perfectly straight photo, cropping it correctly, maybe adjusting the lighting and contrasts in post, and/or making sure the art is the sole focus are small sometimes tedious things that help do your art the most possible justice.

MyNameIs8 responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate you taking the time to write this.

I must admit that most of the choices I made were conscious, like you already mentioned it would not have been necessary to crop the image as bluntly as I did and I did have the tools to do it in a nicer or more clean way. The reason I did it like this was that I wanted to show some of the imperfections that are involved in a drawing like this. Same goes for the scribbles still present above the main character, it just happened to be the piece of paper he was drawn on.

In a way I like to embrace this messy reality of a character that sort of came to me out of nowhere, scribbled down on a notepad containing (classified) information that, when completed, just laid on the desk for a bit until one day I decided he deserved some exposure.

Having said all that.. If this approach makes my art less attractive or makes people feel like I just don't care about what I do, then I would really reconsider the choices I made. Because that is of course not what I am going for (I care deeply about my monsters). So again I really appreciate your comment and I will certainly consider this when going for messy edits again ;)