Thank you Artz... WIP

Looks very nice. The only comment I have is that she looks eyeless... maybe if you added some skin tone to make it more obvious that the eye areas are part of the mask.

Okay following up with more peoples suggestions (thank you everyone for
all the feedback and suggestions ) I gave her a basic pink-ish skin tone in photoshop.

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

Bah that plain flat skintone doesn't go well with the other detailed stuff, it was bugging the heck outta me so......

I went ahead and tried to give it some contrast, shadows, highlights etc. etc. to make it blend in more.
I also touched up they eye slots so they don't look like blank skin so much and put the cheekbone
back in (because I can, nyah nyah ) but lighter this time.

(F.Y.I. fine control of your lines in photoshop is a beyotch without a drawing tablet... or a mouse for that matter...
I just used my trackball >0.o< wish I could just draw on the screen with my pen... anyone got one of these laying
around that they want to send me? )

Ok how's it look now?

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

I'm very impressed... Even more so since you're working with such crude tools.

*hugs the tablet monitor* Mine!

But! Even when using the pen, the anchor and curve tools are wonderful things for making lines btw

Not *that* cool of a tablet monitor, I have a Hitachi Starboard, but the anchor tool lets you plot points, and then using handles, pull the section of line between two points into a curve, so for instance to slap an outline on a circle you'd put down 4 points at the top, bottom, left, and right and between each pair pull the line out til it matched the curve of the circle. It works really well for making 'inks' of scanned pencil sketches for instance. Also very awesome for cel shading coloring.

I need to get a copy of a better paint program.

currently using paint.net and the paintbrush has no options other than size >.<

Crude is being generous.

BTW CR that is looking awesome nice work!!

Do you have a DA page?

For a track ball. that my friend is talent.

Just wanted to add you've been doing some fine work lately keep it up!

CR!!! I want your computer!!! That dragon is so freakin KOOL!!!

Alright, I rarely give out actual critiques like this because they take forever. I generally don't have the patience to do more than a cursory glance, but since CR is actually receptive to feedback and I personally think that he's worthy of the effort involved, I'll go ahead and sit down here for a while.

I don't think that highly of myself, but I'm ridiculously lazy and I'd rather be eating cheesecake and watching TV than actually *DO* something.

Okay, first off since I know that CR doesn't use a scanner to scan his images, we'll need to adjust our perspective so that it matches his own. Judging from the edges of the paper I can see in the camera pic, I can tweak the picture so that it looks more closely like what CR is actually seeing. If I don't adjust like such, any feedback I give him will be inherently flawed.



Of note, there was an issue with a slightly deformed forehead that is only from the skewing of the pic as it's at an angle. That disappears when we adjust back towards the norm, so it's not a real concern.

I'll handle this in a few sections, divided between the parts of the body, rather than subjects like coloring, anatomy, shading, etc. It's easier for people to follow that way and keeps the attention centered on one area at a time. It will go: Hair, Head, Face, Neck, Body.

Hair
The hair here in general is done very well. There's a lot of volume and movement at play here, but done in a way that makes it seem like LJ's hair is full and wavy with body, rather than haphazardly thrown around. The black color is separated with highlights and filled with a blue wash, leaving the most dark colors for the shadows only. We can actually see the hair and what it's doing as opposed to it simply being a flat shape against the page. Portions of it spill forwards in front of her body as well as back, behind her shoulders. This helps give it believability as well as breaking up the symmetry of LJ's body lines.

I see an issue with the top of her head though, as there appears to be an area where there is too little hair.



The red line is the area that LJ's skull takes up, this is based on proportions from the body I can see, her jawline and the curve of her skull as it's shown on the camera left side. Notice the green lines. They represent her hair coming out of her hair follicles. Hair always shoots straight out of the head, before sloping down due to the pull of gravity, or obeying the stylings or hold of hair gel, hair ties, etc. The thicker the hair, the more the hair is going to resist being matted down to the head.

The red arrow is where there should be hair coming out of LJ's scalp and being fluffy before being pulled into the rest of the mane, but there's very little room for that to occur here. We know from the rest of this picture, that LJ's hair has been rendered to be very thick and wavy, so we should expect that to occur here as well. This is where consistency is needed, so she does not appear to have an artificially flat spot on her head.

Note, this is something a lot of artists forget and is a major source of "wig hair" that plagues some people. There needs to be proper room for hair movement out of the scalp and then a consistent pattern as it flows into whatever style is rendered.



Here we can see that LJ's hair is mostly obeying gravity as it swoops backwards and then curls back fowards again upon draping. But the area in the upper right is troubling because it appears to be blown back by a wind force. It's not being pulled back down by gravity and the thickness of it is too great to be a normal part of her hair. If there was indeed a wind that was blowing her hair back, why is it only catching this part of her hair and not the full portion? More consistency is needed between these two sections.

The random fly-aways don't strike me as being an issue, as they are minor and are adding to the interesting nature of her hair, rather than getting in the way.

Head
LJ's head is relatively well proportioned and has a lot of character to it. The jaw is strong, as normal for people who are superheroic in stature but the chin is petite to indicate that the subject is feminine. That's more important that you might think, because without other major features of the gender such as the majority of the body and eyes, the other body parts have to shine even more. Hair could be long for ether gender, and the neck is partially obscured here.

I'm of the opinion that her jaw is too large though, making her appear more masculine than she should.



From the position of the nose and the assumed eyes, it's easy to judge where the ear should be. You can see that it is well covered up by the hair, so we'll have to use our guidelines here to keep note of it.



Since the jaw attaches to the skull underneath and forward of the ear, we know that it should in fact be seen past where the hair is acting as a curtain, rather than continuing backwards into the mane. While sharp angles are generally the territory of men, a woman could have them as well. In this case, it's the combination of sharp angles, hard features and a larger jawline that is causing the problem for me.



In these two pictures, you can see the issue is exacerbated when we add in the neck line, as the current jaw essentially stretches all the way to the back of her head.

Face
There's a couple of issues plaguing the face here, most likely stemmed from the organic style of drawing that CR does. All of the parts of the face are rendered beautifully, making me think that CR has quite the inherent knowledge of it's look and structure. I simply think that because of the nature of his method, he's likely plagued with floating attention. This could be resolved easily with some initial setup lines and something straight to keep a level with.



Here we have the arch of the brows, which are hard and sharp as an exaggeration fitting with the style of comics. Though there's a troubling area where it appears that the bridge of the nose expands from the brow downwards, but this is not apparent on the other side. Is it a shadow? Or is it a part of her face that was not rendered correctly?



Here we'll start to setup the face orientation. By removing the nose, I can get a much better idea of how the eyes relate to the mouth. These are the most important parts due to the way humans perceive faces, so they MUST be correct or else it will look off to people. With these guide lines, we can see that the mouth is relatively in the right position compared to the eyes, which is a good. That means it's got the minimum necessary positioning to look 'right' to the average person.



Extending the lines to the horizontal isn't as successful. The bottom of the eyes matches the plane of the mouth, but the top of the eyes doesn't match. The upper guide line is even more out of place if we assume that the camera right eye is going to keep sloping upwards, which it would if it matched the other eye. If the face was set into perspective, then all the lines would have different angles, as they trail off into the horizon point. With two matching and one different, they don't have the quality for perspective either. This can only be an error in either the angle of the mouth, or the angle of the top of the eyes. This is easy to get caught in, if you do not have an adequate setup beforehand.



Now when we add the nose back in, things get worse. The bottom of LJ's nose is even more skewed, but now in an entirely new direction.



Now we can see that the bottom of her nose is also off center from her eyes and her mouth. Her mouth obeys the center line that the eyes provide, but her nose does not. Another issue that can be overcome by layout and consistency.

Body
The previous issues with LJ's neck were corrected when the problem was hidden by more hair being curtained over. While this is a cheap fix to a more serious issue, it's a correct fix as the audience will not know the difference. Anything that works in a manner that looks correct will function. It is only important that we, as artists understand *how* to do things the correct way, or else we will not be able to grow and adapt past these problems in the future.

I know many people who have problems with hands or feet. You can hide these to cover up for the lack of skill, but you can only hide them for so long. It limits your range of what you can do with your characters and will make your art static and dull over time. I do not think CR has this issue, but I am addressing it as general learning advice.



There is very little of the body to address here, as there is very little within the border of the picture here. The neck is nicely formed and the smoothness of the curve from the neck into the shoulders and collarbone is beautiful and feminine. For a character with such hard features, this is the one major part of her body that is most definitely female. Her larger shoulders give her strength, but they're not so large that they seem out of place.



I believe that her collarbone is a little too high here, the indicated line is where I feel that her real collarbone should be, as normal collarbones are slightly underneath the top of the shoulders. Putting them level is an oversimplification, IMO. This is because while the collarbone is relatively horizontal, they go through the muscle of the deltoids, rather than on top of them. (At least for the muscled heroes of comics.) They also angle downwards slightly as they attach themselves to the sternum.



If we assume that the current location of the sternum is correct, which I feel that it is, then we can assume symmetry from both sides of LJ's costume. From the measure of the distance from her sternum dimple to the red part of her costume on her camera left side, I can then measure the same distance to the camera right side. Since they don't match, it's an indication that either her sternum is not center on her body, or her costume is not rendered correctly. Her "LJ" logo is centered upon the black section of her costume, but that black section does not seem to be centered on her body. The solution is either to move her sternum so that it matches the costume better, or move the costume so that it's centered better.

Flip
As a final check, always flip your image. Things tend to appear when you flip the image, because your brain gets trained into seeing something as 'normal' the first time you see it. By flipping the image, we trick our brains into re-assessing the image once more, only this time we compare it to the image we already had. We're more likely to see a mistake when the brain tries to put the two images together into a mental turnaround.



In the flip, it's much easier to see the problems of the 'flat hair' the off center nose and the unbalanced costume. These might be caught early in the WIP, if it was flipped. To flip a physical image, just turn on a lamp and flip your paper over, using the light to shine through. If you're lucky enough to have access to a graphic editor and scanner, then it's easy to just flip it there.


Shadowing
As a final word of advice, I would recommend keeping all shadowing in a picture be kept consistent with the entire picture unless there are other light sources to consider. Shadowing is a difficult skill and one that takes much practice and sweat in order to gain control over. Nobody ever truly masters it, we all just get a little closer each time.



It's difficult to determine where the light source is in this picture. LJ's face makes it seem like the light source is coming from camera right, but her neck would indicate that it's from directly overhead. Even taking into account reflected light and cast shadow, there appears to be two entirely separate light sources.



This would be a more consistent lighting method if you wanted to have the light source be coming from above and to camera right. The green areas would be cast shadows, where something was dropping a shadow on the thing under it. Such as the flip of LJ's hair or her jawline. The blue areas would be form shadows caused by the light simply not getting to the dark side of the body. Cast shadows are generally darker than form shadows, because a cast shadow is an absence of light, where a form shadow is a slow gradient of shade where the light isn't 100%. It's possible to see cast shadows within a form shadow.


Final
Ignoring shadowing due to it's extreme difficulty, there are a few solutions to these problems that can be applied to future pictures so that they do not become issues again.

One, use an underdrawing. With organic drawing, you draw part of the picture in full before you're done with the entire thing. This makes us too focused upon one part of a picture and we lose sight of the whole thing. Doing an underdrawing will help with that, as it provides a basic skeletal structure for you to follow. That will allow you to check your proportions and measurements first, to make sure they are correct, before you commit much time and energy to them. It's a reminder note when you get caught up on that one section of the body without thinking about how it's going to connect to the next.

Two, keep a ruler handy. It's useful for making straight lines, but it's real value is in measuring out distances between objects. If you know that a body is a certain amount of heads high, measure the head and make sure your drawing matches. If you know that the eyes are one eye width apart, then measure it. Every time you know that there's a measurement you can take to re-assure correct proportion, do it. A foot is roughly the length of the forearm. The hips are roughly the half way mark for the body length. The face is roughly the size of your entire hand from wrist to fingertips. So forth and so forth.

KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. When artists are unsure of something, they tend to BS it. If you can help it, don't ever BS something. Learn about what you're unsure of so you can render it accurately. If you cannot, then simplify instead of over complicate. Adding in extra random details instead of omitting them is usually a good way to call attention to inability to render something. This was apparent in the nose bridge area, as it seems like there was some confusion as to how to shadow it properly. It would have been better if it was over simplified, instead of attempted haphazardly. The result is that it winds up sticking out even more.

Overall CR has a wonderful style a a lot of talent that's yet to be fully tapped. A good sense of general proportion and a familiarity with the subject matter are already in place, putting him much higher up the artist ladder than the average person. I see volume, form and presence in his art which is surprising from someone who basically came out of nowhere. There's a lot of raw talent here just waiting to be honed into something amazing.

Control is needed though, as parts tend to drift all over the place as attention is too focused on one thing at a time. More setup time and investment in the whole, rather than the details would serve him well. At the moment things look nice and we are impressed by the level of detail and style that is brought forth, but upon further inspection everything breaks down. Much of the basic art skills need to be built up so that the talent has a framework on which to grow on. This may prove to be more or less difficult than a starting student, depending upon how flexible CR is to changing his methods.

Regardless of the flaws within, the LJ piece is wonderful and is something to be proud of. No amount of negative harping on it would change that. We simply take it what we can and learn from it so that the next piece is even better.

WOAH! that's a BOOK!

Yarrrr an' all I did was ask him ta have a peep at the changes but bein' the scalleywag he is I be gettin' a library!
I downloaded a (pirated) copy (naturally) of the text and the images to boot so I can re-read
it as necessary and reference it in the future.

*** Pirate mode off for a moment***

Now that is my kind of critique!
Detailed, to the point, and overdrawn lines to illustrate the points made. I already see several things
I can carry forward to improve my art in the future. When I asked you to have a look I wasn't
expecting a full critique like this but I am so glad you took the time to lay it all out Suichiro.

Thank you.

***Ok Pirate mode re-engaged (hey my own beer volcano and stripper factory have to be earned by being
the best pirate I can be ya know... go with noodles, RAmen).***

AVAST YE SWABS! Quit yer lolligaggin' and leave more comments and be sure to do it in pirate speak
or I be havin yer guts on me blade!

P.S. Yes indeed me matey's today be International Talk like a Pirate day!
jus' so ye not be thinkin' I iz doin this jus to shiver me timbers.
Now go forth ye' scurvy landlubbers and spread the word
or yul walk me plank!

An tell 'em Cap'n OrangeBeard sent ye'!

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

Now nobody can say I don't know WTF I'm talking about. I don't do critiques like this because they just take forever. This took me the better part of 3 hours. :/