The Crit Corner Part I

Hello hello! It’s time to begin our crit day extravaganza!

Crossover Fan Art by Jonathan

Our first piece comes from Jonathan A Moore who graces us with some lovely Star Wars/X-men work. The first thing I noticed about this piece, aside from it’s epic subject matter of course, was the strong lighting throughout. The lighting was rendered with confidence and I am impressed. This is a good example of showing the difference between cast shadows and form shadows as cast shadows (like that shown under the assailant’s arm) are sharper than form shadows (like the gradual shadow on Han’s cheek). A lot of digital art I see nowadays have shadows with soft transitions and it ends up looking a bit blurred.

That being said, I do see some room for improvement. I feel there isn’t enough mid-tone in Solo’s face and you may have gone just a tad too far with the sharpness. The transition from the dark side to the light side (haha) is a bit drastic. I also wish there were more saturation throughout to really make the image pop. It looks to me like white was used to brighten, and black was used to darken. In general, I don’t recommend this as your colors become dull quite fast. Instead, try using a slight tint to your highlight and for shadows, add more saturation as you go darker. In this case, I think the highlight color would work well with yellow and orange hues to reflect the desert environment outside. Adding a slight overall color will really help pull it together and make the whole illustration look cohesive.

The area with greatest contrast is Han’s face, which is great as you always want your focal point to be the area with greatest contrast, but the background has so many different light and dark values and details it’s getting a bit busy. I added a layer of soft color over the background and reduced the opacity until I got to a good balance of foreground to background. A way to avoid having this problem in Photoshop is to check your values as you create the piece by starting a new layer on top of everything, fill it with black, and set the layer to saturation. This will give you a great view that can easily be turned on and off to show you how your values are working. Here’s my “after”:

Water Sylph by MeMilly

Our next piece comes to us from MeMilly. The first thing I noticed was the lack of strong light source. It seems more of a soft ambiguous light. Instead of thinking of things like individual objects, a leaf here, grapes there, a face, etc. think of everything as having planes and shade accordingly. Like this:

Now you can more clearly determine where light and shade should fall. The light source is in the front, slightly above, and to the right. With that in mind, focus on highlights where the plane changes create specular highlights that catch the light just right. With frontal lighting, the sides of the face should darken to help them recede into the background, so I added some shading to either side of her face. I also enlarged her forehead, as it appeared a bit too small. Typically, in a frontal view, the distance from the brow to the hairline is the same as the distance from the brow to the tip of the nose. I added a little texture and significantly changed her hair. Her hair should appear wet, like her face. Wet hair clings to the head, appears darker throughout, and features sudden specular highlights.

The background lacked form, as the leaves appeared to be drawn without consideration of light source. Again, think about plane changes. The sides of the grapes needed shading to convey the overall curved form a vine of grapes would have. Similarly, the leaves should have shading to push the tops further into the background and to show cast shadows from the leaves above.

Lastly, I added more color variation to make the image more visually interesting. I realize this was a color challenge and that you had a limited color palette to work with, but I felt this added more depth. The final before and after:

I didn’t spend enough time on this to call it a finished piece, but rather, this serves as a starting point for MeMilly to take it to the level. I hope it was helpful.