Potential Portfolio Piece, Now Just a Practice Piece

[stormygabe]

Hey everyone. Hope this isn't a bad time to post up a new thread. (It's around 8:30 pm my time.)

I've been lurking these forums for quite some time and the community seems very helpful without too much ass kissing. I figured, since I eventually want to go pro, I should begin participating.

As such, here is my first critique request. (Hope I'm posting this correctly.) This piece was done in hopes of making a portfolio piece, mainly focusing on character, but I'm not sure I achieved that. That's also the reasoning for the title of this thread. I learned quite a bit from doing this. And while I was initially happy with it, I started having a few doubts, but am not sure on what elements. Is there anything you guys would do differently that would improve on this? Any constructive feedback will be very welcome. Thanks

[Hunger_Artist]

Hey, you're missing out on a lot of cool lighting effects you could use to sell the character. Generally to get your characters appealing you're going to need a masterful grasp of anatomy, proportion and gesture, or a really great sense of how to light your characters, and ideally, both.

I did a quick paintover to show you what I mean. And for improvement I would do lots and lots of mastercopies of great classical paintings and life drawing. Really as many as you can. It's one of the best work vs reward artistic challenges you can do.

[SSDS]

Hello!
Great job on the character, he looks rather appealing))

I think that your picture could use a bit more of color and saturation variations. Also you should probably make an accent on his face by adding light in this area and/or darkening other parts of the picture. Some "motion" effects would be cool, too.

Also.. where are bubbles?..))

I don't have a tablet with me right now to work properly, but you got the point))

[pauloricardo]

Hunger_Artist gave you some good advices to improve your paintings.... some effects he said, you can achieve using filters... Photoshop and other digital tools have that. Just go there and try... after sometime, you will get good effects...

[stormygabe]

Thanks so much for the replies! Hope I'm not too late in my response. I had work from around 7am this morning till now. The paintovers also help a ton.

Hunger_Artist
Oh wow this is cool! Lol I see what you mean here. The extra colors really do help push the image beyond what I originally had it at. I didn't even consider it as I was only thinking "He's underwater..water makes things blue. MAKE EVERYTHING BLUE!" So thanks a lot for that! I have found many people suggesting old master studies. I'll have to begin integrating that into my learning. I do some still life study as well, but mostly sketching, so I think more finished paintings from life will help with color as well. Thanks again for the feedback

SSDS
Thanks for your feedback! I'll definitely add some extra bubbles and details to the image. I think I was trying too hard to emulate reality (or what I thought was reality, clearly that can use more study) so I left out bubbles. Not sure if that makes any sense. (I figured bubbles can only be added to water if there's air there, and I assumed there wouldn't be in this scene.) They do add something a bit more to the image and help push it further though, so thanks for that

pauloricardo
Yes there was some very good advice here! I'll try taking further advantage of Photoshop's features and filters. Hopefully that will help with improvement.

Thanks again everyone!