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SourCherryJack

149 Art Reviews

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I really like the style and color use here. There is a lot of personality in the shapes used and the construction of the characters, which is impressive considering they're just busts. The shading on them is very nice and consistent with light source (I especially like the glow coming from their eyes), however they appear to be shaded using different techniques, the purple one has a very apparent grainy texture, whereas the blue one is much smoother and even has some extra highlights on the hair that indicate a plastic or ceramic surface. Being that the two characters are together the texture difference is a bit jarring. I like the choice of background here, but I think it would be better suited if it were lightly rounded along the edges to better emulate an old tv set. I question whether or not the red outline is necessary, I think they have enough boldness to stand out without it, but its not really negatively effecting the drawing in my opinion. Also on the blue on those little stray hairs at the top would probably cast a light shadow onto her ear, so look out for those little things.
I hope this helps in some capacity, great work, keep it up!

Awesome work on this. I love the excellent use of not only the monochromatic range, but also the limited value range as well; it does a great job of keeping all of the details very present but not overbearing and largely holds the focal point well with the limited use of red in there.
The sense of depth is also very impressive, as is the sense of motion and life in the background; the way the features are shaded and colored from neutral tones to highlights so sharply mixed with the webs (or strings of goo) gives the environment a lot of life and motion. Balancing those parts with the focal point is a very tight rope you manage to walk incredibly well here.
I will say a small nitpick of this is that when viewed at full size some of the features look a bit shaky particular in the top corners on the highlights, but those disappear if viewed at a slightly smaller than full size. The red on the, what looks like an eye above the girl pulls the attention away fro her in the sword and disrupts the natural flow the rest of the drawing is working to create from the edges of the painting down to the sword in the ground (or vise versa). Perhaps recoloring it, moving it lower, or adding more would help to fix that. Also this is purely my view, but I think the shine coming from the sword would be better at full white to really bring it out, I get that it would disrupt the palette range, but it would definitely bring it out more.
This is an excellent painting and it does so much so well, great work, man. Looking forward to more!

HeartlessArts responds:

WOW thanks for the super in depth review, i dont even know what monochromatic means lol, yea i guess you're right the red does pull the attention away but i did want to keep the red true to the original NPC all the red parts including the sword are red in the original and i thought it would be nice if i made her red parts stand out :3 thank you so much :D <3

I like the idea you have here, it's a good start for sure. The placement of the two characters sets the drawing up for a strong and interesting composition. However your coloring style, color choice and lighting really bring it down. To start you need to sharpen up your shading a lot, right now its very soft all around; and it looks like you use straight white to get lighter tints in there as opposed to using lighter tints of the color, this gives you a sort of plastic-y look in a lot of places, particularly the jacket. Right now the brown of the other room and the brown of his jacket are kind of making the drawing too brown, you should change the floor's color; from what I understand Hotline Miami has really bold colors, you should take advantage of that and really use some stronger, bolder and more vibrant colors, the floors could use it a lot. Look up the time period and place, I'm not an expert but 1980's Miami interior design were not really into brown and pale pink as colors, from my understanding the went more on the ivory and marble floor type things, shiny and lighter. Your highlights are too much, the huge white splotches on the floor and the walls should be gotten rid of entirely, they kind of look like clouds and attract too much attention, I understand that you're going for the muzzle flare's lighting and that's a good read, but the light on the walls would be much dimmer for one and be much more evenly distributed as opposed to super focused on those spots.
You should do some perspective studies around your house to get a feel for how walls and floors line up and how to better keep it consistent, right now you've done a decent job, but walls in a building are generally all comprised of right angles and the divide between the two rooms and the far wall aren't lined up as well as they could be.
Also that box looks like it is floating, doing some basic object still lives can really help with getting objects to line up with a base, I strongly recommend doing some. The 7,500 above the chicken guys head is a bit out of place in that black box, if you removed the black box and made it bigger I think it would stand out and fit much better.
I hope this helps in some capacity, keep up the good work!

IceBreak23 responds:

too long, but yeah to make an background is not that easy it takes alot of time to make, i'm just tyring my best.

You have a pretty strong and dramatic composition going here, but there are a few nagging issues with this drawing that are holding it back. The most glaring of them is that you didn't draw everything yourself, I get that its a fanart mash up thing, but the background and especially the fire should be drawn by you. Not only is it just a better thing to have drawn it all yourself for the experience of it, but also it would make everything look much more cohesive; right now you have a cartoony anime thing going on in the foreground, a realistic fire and then another cartoon together in the middleground and you have a 3D rendered desk in the background. The mixing of styles like that could work in some circumstances, but I think it would just be an overall stronger piece if you did the background yourself.
Past that that as stated I really like the composition here. You get a nice sort of implied strong diagonal line from the security guard to the robot behind him which gives it a dynamic feel. The coloring and lighting is also well done on the guard and and really sells the depth, I think you could have toned down the highlights to better match the fire. Fire is a tricky light source to work with and given the color and dispersion of the fire you used to I would say to dim your highlights just a bit to better match the fire's color, or brighten the color of the fired, the robot in the back even for being simpler is shaded very well. To get even more technical into the composition I think moving that one pillar of fire that comes from under the robot's hand and goes up through it down and to the right a bit and then heighten the opacity a bit so that it isn't "breaking up" the two characters and instead framing the space leading to them would better help to define and guide the viewers from the guard to the robot. Also widen that lamp a bit, lower it and move it left, maybe offset it so that its diagonal tilted with the upward side to the right and it will also help bring out the composition.
Hope this helps in some capacity, There's a lot of promise in this drawing, the shading especially, keep up the good work.

I like the how clean and crisp the is, the line work and shading are very nice an consistent and go quite well together. While I don't really care much for the design philosophy of this kind of character is it is unarguably largely well executed. Her legs not being there for me is a misstep, but the manner in which you have omitted them is much better than simply having them run off of the page so good work with that. The light blue glow of the threads do a great job of offsetting the mostly muted earthy tones of both her cloths and skin, as well a create a nice direct line to guide the eye and strengthen the overall composition (which in admittedly would be much harder to pull off if you had included the legs). There are a few issues with the color fills going outside of the linework, most notably the hand on the right. The biggest issue I have with this character design is with her belt, the band on her hat her gloves and the line across her skirt and by extension I suppose all of the cosmetic stitching on her jacket as well. Right now you have two different, white-ish colors going on, for the sake of continuity in her color scheme they would definitely do better as the same color as opposed to the two. Its really nitpicky, but considering the large focus on just the character it stands out much more. Also another strange thing is the lightning bolt on her hat and the bolt earring she's wearing. I don't know your character, but she definitely has a sewing thing going on what with the thread, the dolls, and the stitching on herself, I would think, again, for the sake of character design continuity instead of a lightning bolt she should have a thimble, or a spool, or a pincushion or a bobbin or some other sewing related item, the lightning bolt is kind of random. Same goes for the bolt earring.
Either way it's a very well drawn design with excellent shading and a lot of personality. I don't personally care too much for the actual design so that brings it down a bit for me. Hope this helps in some capacity excellent work!

justZaz responds:

holy crap, kudos just for taking the time to write this, but many thanks for doing so.
admittedly i got lazy in some parts (the different white-ish colors for instance i just kinda did because i had some swatches lying around and just sort of picked at them haphazardly). the bolt and lightning thing do have something to do with her actual character though (this is just a costume design i suppose - not canon, as it were).

im still learning, but stuff like what you wrote could only help me get better, so thanks again!

This drawing has issues. First and foremost, it's way too bright, the character being a vibrant orange like that wouldn't be problem if not for the white background. Right now because of the white background two things are happening; one, you've got a much more boring compostion going on; two, its bringing down you character by making her get a bit lost in the overall lightness. I would recommend going in with a darker, somewhat muted blue or blue-violet for the background, maybe with some sort of SUBTLE fire/glow effect to bring the character out more with some nice dark/light contrast, as well as tonal contrast between the complimentary colors (blue/orange and violet/yellow in case you didn't know).
The wing things need work, right now they look sketched on, either fully realize them and make them consistent with the rest of the character because right now they're bring her down as they are. Also, the way her legs are cut off hurts the overall composition as well. When displaying a character design it is almost always best to show them in their entirety. Her nails would be better suited as either yellow (to match her tattoos) or magenta (to match her hair). When working with character design its important to stick to a solid well defined color scheme, the shade of slightly lightish-pale orange they are now is too close to the orange of her body and gets lost easily.
Ditch the watermark in the middle, its ugly like super ugly, way too dark, way too complicated and entirely unnecessary (unless you are a fairly well known artist selling prints); in the event that somebody tries to steal your work, confront them, tell them to take it down and report them to whatever site they're posting it on, the idea that a watermark is doing any good on places like newgrounds and deviantart is largely unfounded. But if you want to stick with it, definitely streamline your mark, make it one color (white/grey) make it more transparent and place it in place that does minimal damage to the composition.
This could benefit from shading, generally its good work with three to four shades/tints of a color; your base, a darker shade and and a highlight you could also add one for highlights and really dark shades, it will benefit the readability of your character and give a greater sense of depth, but she appears to be a being of energy so maybe it works fine without it.
Either way, hope this helps in some capacity and keep up the good work.

MysticSkillz responds:

It's all part of my process, this is just the first step. ;)

Looks great man. You've got some excellent contrast coming through on this and really great, crisp shading. I especially like the way you've changed up shading techniques and color use between the face and the hands, it adds some really good dimension as well as shows an understanding of the differences between skin and the way light interacts with skin on different parts of the body. That being said you could definitely refine that hand a bit more, right now its largely featureless, especially in the middle, and lose its form a bit as it meets the cuff of the jacket, it stands out much more because of how close it is to the detail on the face. The jacket is also very well realized - and more than just being very well shaded with the folds - it gives a great amount of dark/light contrast with the hand and face which also works great with the gradation on the red background.
The biggest issue with this drawing though is one that I didn't even notice until the end of this review: you made the image to large. When viewed in full size there are definitely very noticeable cracks in the armor, you lose a bit of the crispness of the jackets edge against the red, some of the highlights lose a bit of there umph (super technical term there) but that can be fixed by just re-sizing the dimensions and uploading that in place of this one. Choosing the right size, or distance to view art from is a huge part of the process that is often overlooked, especially with digital. Case in point here, it does a disservice to have the larger size available.
Even so, awesome job on this, hope this helped in some capacity, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more from you.

ScaredyDave responds:

Very great advice! I often forget to resize the image to one that makes the cracks go away. I usually work in too large a file size and forget to look at it in full size when its all complete! Thanks so much for the very informative critique! I will implement these suggestions soon! (I can at least do the size tonight though!)

Right off the bat there are a lot of issues going on in here. Most notably is your shading, there is really no consistency to the way it is done, it seems you have a general idea for the base layer where the light source is (top right) but then you have these highlights placed randomly on all parts of the character that completely disagree with that. The highlights should only occur on the parts where the light is directly hitting and generally they'd contour with a certain area or are on an edge so the light would really be focused. The best way to wrap your head around that concept is doing still lives of various household objects under a single, strong light source.
Also problematic with your shading technique is that it is very limited and honestly quite boring. You currently really only have a standard color and then a slight shade of that color on any given area. you should try using multiple shades and tints to get better depth in your character as well as bring out the contrast a bit more. The character outline is largely unnecessary, but if you're going to keep it it should probably match the yellow bars going across the bottom or be different color, right now as is they're too close.
The way the legs get cut off is jarring and takes away from the drawing as a whole, you should really consider reformatting your composition to fit them on there. Back to the shading, I feel like its way too soft as well and combined with the outlines it makes for an unappealing effect. I would say either go full cartoon with sharp, crisp cellshading and keep the lines; or go full on render with a very well developed dark, to medium-dark, to medium... to light, and ditch the outlines.
On the character itself right now she is very much in the same color family throughout. She's all yellow, brown, tan and orange, the white, the red and the black are nice in that the break it up a bit, but more of that is definitely needed. Try experimenting with complementary colors as accents like jewelry or clothing patterns, they'll bring a lot of nice contrast out and make drawings much more visually striking. I get that this is fanart, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it your own.
That "nyaa" written there in a very basic font could also go, if you're going to include lettering in a drawing, really go all out, make the words feel necessary to the drawing, give them personality to accentuate the characters, using canned fonts, especially soulless canned fonts like that don't give any real insights into the character and just serve to distract from the focus.
Finally your signature/watermark thing is a bit too big, complicated and intrusive, for future pieces try streamlining that, make it smaller less busy and probably a bit more transparent. Make it a single color as well, the blueish fill with the white outlines draw way too much attention to it, better to just stick with white.
Hope that helped in some capacity, you have a lot of promise, definitely keep up the good work!

I like the way you shaded this, it really sells the action figure vibe. The left arm and hand look to be considerably larger and longer than the right though, that should be flipped because the right is closer to us. the white outline around the character is a good way to make a character without a background pop however the splat marks in the background are the same color as the outline so it just looks really busy and distracts from the character. You should either get rid of them entirely since the character design looks to be strong enough to stand on his own, or dull the color of the splats; maybe a darker olive shade to match with the character.
Good work, hope that helped in some capacity.

This type of style has a lot of potential, when I first looked at it it wasn't particularly grabbing but when I took a closer look I noticed that you have a pretty strong understanding of shadows and that the linework is seriously holding this piece back. I would recommend you refine this style some more, ditch the lines entirely and bring out the features and details exclusively with values as opposed to the lines, you're already practically there. The value work is especially notable on the face and jacket. I would recommend working in three tones of each color to cover the standard color, the shade and the highlight areas. I think going with that type of style would really make your art stand out from the rest as well as improve understanding of color tones and values.
Also the reflections on those sunglasses could use some work, the lights should better follow the contour of the glasses right now it looks like you're trying to get that effect but not really committing to it, pick up a pair of sunglasses and study the way the light wraps around the glass parts as well as the frames.
Hope that helped in some capacity. Good luck moving forward, man.

AniLover16 responds:

Thanks!! :D
I'll do my best and thanks for the tips.. :D

Yeah, something like that.

Jack @SourCherryJack

Age 29

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Kool Skool

Los Angeles

Joined on 8/11/09

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