LF: Character and Art Critiques

You have a fabulous sense of colour, and it's clear you aren't afraid to experiment with it! I love the way you use colour to express character and tone. Your art is very expressive, and very stylistic, which is awesome! I'm always in favour of artists having a style that's unique to them, and it's very obvious your art style is yours alone. You also have a great sense of pose, facial expression, and character development, and these are often the hardest things to nail down! I also love the sketchy quality of your artwork. It makes the characters feel more real, and adds a bit of texture.

I think your biggest issue lies in anatomy, and honestly, developing that skill really just boils down to practice, practice, practice! Oh, and using plenty of references. I can see where you've gotten a little lazy with anatomy, or maybe just given up after not being able to get it right (hands, am I right?). We've all been there. All you can do is keep on working at it!

All in all, great style, good art, just needs some polishing. Keep up the great work!

Agreed! Use more reference, whether foe gesture drawing or for more detailed pieces to help ground your work with a more fluid grasp on anatomy. In particular, your fingies are a bit bagled compared to your arm and shoulder knowledge, which seems more practiced. 

You could stand to put together a folder of nine to twelve "goals" images that rep the height of the style you want to aim for, from artists in the top of the industry. Drop your piece in with them and compare them; if you're as brutal a self critic as I am you'll know right away where you effed up. Choose for colours, use of light, the way they used their line weight, backgrounds or graphic details, anatomy, expressions, body language, etc! 

Shading is a little to be desired, no offence. Are you using are you darker main colors of the art or using just black for shading? Never use black for shading, use cool colors like blue or purple or anything else like red or green. Black for shading just doesn't look right.

one tip for character design, is a little bit of asymmetry goes a long way! the silhouette will look super interesting, and keeping silhouette in mind in general is super important. a good thing to do is to study the silhouettes/designs of other artists to see how they use asymmetry in their designs!

honestly im bad for anatomy advice but my opinion is that as long as everything is proportionate, you can make anything work (within reason) lol. my favorite thing to draw is clothing folds and i find that they can exaggerate and cover up the anatomy in my art that i lack confidence in. little things like looking at how your clothing naturally folds is honestly the best reference. 

i really like your colors! in your shading, you could definitely push the values more! it can help make the picture feel less flat when you go the extra mile to make those shadows even deeper. even more so when you incorporate multiple light sources : D

WhiskeyWorks

Thank you! I definitely understand I need more anatomy practice and can see where I've gotten lazy! I appreciate your honest critique!

dray 

Thank you for the advice! When I know more of what I want my style to be, I'll definitely look into that!

JadeWizard

I don't think I've shaded anything for a long while, and I tend to use either a warmer or cooler colour to shade when I do, dependent on the look I want. I don't think I've ever used black to shade. Thank you for the critique though!

arsenic

I haven't shaded anything in such a long time, I think that's a good reminder to shade in general! And I do see that I need a lot of work in anatomy, thank you for the critique and advice!

Wicked

I certainly realize that my hands are rarely good, I think I got lazy and decided that chunky fingers required less effort. But I do see that I do need to put in the effort for anatomy and have focused the past couple of days on hands in general! How arms attach to torsos I've practised less, but I'll definitely try to learn more about that!

Lineart wise, I landed on this style of line art after a long time of not liking how thinner, sharper line art looks with how I draw, as the softer look of thicker, sketchier line art lends itself better to what I like drawing! The advice is appreciated though! Thank you for taking the time to critique my art and offer advice!