Fantasy Paintings - nudity

[Gilead]

Hi guys
I've been taking an oil painting class in the evenings from a former illustrator named JD Parrish. It's nice to have a teacher who has done and understands illustration instead of being disdainful of it.

Most of these are oils over acrylic on masonite.

[MephistoLV]

Watch the anatomy on the girl's crotch. Right now, the deep creases where the thigh meets the pubic bone are making it look like her pudenda is sticking out too far and hanging down like a penis. I think the area just needs a bit more subtlety in the folds.

[Rich Pellegrino]

Hey Gilead, I wanted to leave you an in depth crit because you were nice enough to do so for me in my SB.

I think first of all, you can tell the difference when your looking from observation(life) or making it up. The made up work is a weak point which can be fixed. I think you need to use more reference and pay attention to how light falls across objects and anatomy. It looks like you painting only local colors and adding white to you're highlights, i.e. the orange dragon (well it looks more like a bright yellow rather than white). The white unicorn should have some green reflected light bouncing up from the grass into the shadows. What happened to the horseback riders legs?

There are many compositional quirks I see too. The giant moon which is oddly cropped. It can work but there is so much contrast between the night sky and the stark white moon that it looks wrong. I think Foster did this very same thing in one of his pieces in his last post. He gets away with it through subtle value shifts from the sun to sky.

The strongest fantasy piece is the last one IMO. There is some nice paint handling going on, especially n the moons/spheres in the upper left. I would watch the over usage of contrast. You are creating a big X in this piece. Maybe this is what you wanted.

All in all, you have great work ethic and drive and with that anything is possible. I am impressed by the amount of work you produce. Just be careful not to paint "just to paint" but always be learning. That part never ends. I can tell you were painting the skull from life not only by the set up, but the level of observation. There is some great understanding of light in that piece, more of that!

Rich

[Qitsune]

Wow, you have neat stuff going on here, my favorites have to be the skull and the dragon. I like the background on the pinup girl but her boobs kinda scare me, they have a strange shape to them.

Keep up the good work! Looks like you are taking a great stride outside your comfort zone, that can only be good.

[lyon]

Good job Gilead. It is good to see some new paintings frome you. The skull painting with the goblet is one of your strongest paintings so far. I also really like the bottom image, the sci-fi one. It is great to see you progressing this way. I agree with the comments that voodoochile made. I would love to see you do some more extended painting from life. The more hours you put in in front of something real, the better your fantasy pieces are going to get. Again, I think the last piece and the skull are huge steps forward for you. Keep it up!

Howard

[Gilead]

Thanks for the well considered replies everyone. This is exactly the kind of thing I need.

MephistoLV, Even if I'd gotten nothing else from your crit you would still get points for using the word "Pudenda". But you were also dead on, she looked like she had a scrotum hanging there. I tried to fix that.

voodoochile thanks for that, I tried to address several of those things. See below.

Qitsune, Thank you. Actually the girl in the picture said the boobs looked just like hers so I...got it right. (I was about to say I nailed those boobs, but that would be inaccurate, I never touched the gal.)
I'm definately out of my comfort zone here and intend to keep pushing it.

lyon, thanks dude. We may be doing a life drawing / painting thing again this summer you should come join us in all your free time. In the meantime my fantasy type work is going to be from refference photos at best because that's the best I can arrange for.

I did some work on the items mentioned. Sorry about the multiple replies, but if I say something about the pictures in between attatchments they come out as thumbnails and then, I think, no one would bother looking at them.

This is ink and watercolor on paper 11"X15" I darkened the crotch area to hide my mistake a bit then darkened some other areas to match. It came out a bit grimy looking.
51831

[Gilead]

12"X16" Acrylic on masonite. Part of my mistake was to make the horse's body too slender. I wanted to argue that the ride's leg doesn't show in the refference photo, but as I always say; "In a visual medium, if it looks wrong it is wrong."
51838

[Gilead]

I can't tell you how happy I was with my unicorn until someone pointed out that his head was too big. (I posted these in my sketchbook as well) Sure enough, it started out as a bit more of a rear view, but ended up as a side view which threw it all out of proportion. I was so enamored of my lighting effects that I failed to notice it.
So here I've made the whole hind end of the body bigger to correct it. It looks more like the photo anyhow. I also tried to give the landscape a bit more visual depth and threw some reflected light into the underside of the horse.
16"X12" Acrylic on masonite
51839

[Gilead]

Sorry for the crappy photos here. It's dark out so I had to take these indoors. I have a harder time photographing my art than painting it.

I glazed most of this one a bit darker because people say my work looks flat...not sure this helped.
12"X16" Oils over acrylics on masonite

[Gilead]

voodoochile, Placing this guy in the center of an X was precisely my intention. It may not be a good idea, but it is what I intended.
I was hesitant to do anything to this one because the purple-yellow contrast in the sky is what my instuctor liked about it. He said the camera would like it. However I toned down the yellow cloud a bit especially on the left to break that x shape a little.
22"X14" oil over acrylics on board.
51868

[Gilead]

I darkened the undersides of this dragon a bit and put blue reflected lights in there.
10"X14" Oils over acrylic on masonite
51872

[lyon]

Cool. I will have to plan ahead so that I can make those classes this time around. About using reference. I didn't mean that you need to have live models for your fantasy work, photos are great. What I mean, is that the more time you spend painting from life, whether it is a still life, or figure work, or whatever, the better your paintings painted from photos, or pure imagination will become. The new scans are much better. Let me know when the classes start up in case I don't hear it from JD. Thanks.