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#backdrop #background #birch #break #buddies #cartoon #cirrus #clouds #crosscountry #elf #elven #elves #exercise #forest #friends #friendship #goth #gothic #grass #hill #hills #hilly #human #humans #morning #mountain #mountains #mountainside #muscles #muscular #pals #path #pine #rest #run #running #scenery #stretch #stretches #stretching #sun #sunlight #sunrise #sunshine #track #trackandfield #trail #valley #vista #warmup #water #wing #wings #woods #warmingup #latemorning
Published: 2016-09-12 00:12:03 +0000 UTC; Views: 19405; Favourites: 18; Downloads: 2
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Description
Art trade with , featuring her characters Carter Pengara, Altea Meza, and Kailey Silverrain (from left to right) getting ready for some kind of exercise, perhaps a run through the valley on a nice late-summer morning, with some stretches and water. It was immensely difficult to get the colors right on the mountainside, but I plugged away at it, trying different combinations of them, and I'm not disappointed. Hope you enjoy this, Crimsn!Related content
Comments: 12
first of all - the background on this is absolutely gorgeous! all the work you put into it really paid off. i'm also really impressed on your posing and your grasp on lighting! however, there are a few areas you could improve on.
for one thing, your characters seem somewhat stiff. i've found that the best way to improve this is to do gesture drawings, and try to use more curves in capturing the pose. also try studying human muscle structure! i've found this video really helpful: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DoCI8…
another thing is that you don't seem to make much use of line weight. if you have a tablet, use pen pressure, it feels so much more natural and really adds to the drawing! if not try experimenting with a brush pen. line weight really adds to making the drawing look more dynamic.
another area to improve on is shading. do you shade with black? i wouldn't recommend that; it's better to use more color in shadows, since they almost always have some tint to them. take for instance this photo:
68.media.tumblr.com/0bc3774c94…
try color sampling the shadows on his hand versus the areas where the light hits; you'll notice they're much more pink. similarly, in a golden lighting such as in this painting, shadows would likely have a golden tint to them.
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Wait, so shadows should have a tint of the general lighting color, e.g. yellow? I would think it would be the opposite - they should be blue/purple in yellow light to add contrast (these are slightly blue/purple, but possibly too dark to tell).
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hmmm yeah you have a point - admittedly that's an area i need to work on too :Y i think either one might work in this photo, i'd recommend trying out both just to see what looks better, and adding more saturation to the color.
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Howdy! I'm swinging on by from ProjectComment
First of all, let me just say that your agonizing over the colour scheme has payed off. The whole image reads as harmonious and natural for a bright sunny day. Your use of perspective is really sound, and the composition of the image as a whole is pleasing. I especially like how you've rendered the background!
However, something that strikes me as a little off are Kailey's wings. They appear to lack structure, and at first I wasn't sure if they were a part of her costume or her body.
I really recommend this tutorial on drawing humanoids with wings ragswarrior.wordpress.com/2014… as being a good place to start. Unless her wings are made of magic or shadows or something, they should be anatomically feasible. Look at images of actual birds to help you, as a lot of tutorials around here are woefully inaccurate.
Another area I feel you can improve on is the shading. While your light source is consistent, and your figures all show good volume, the particular tones and shades you've used strike me as a little lackluster. Am I correct in assuming you used black to shade with?
Shadows and highlights generally need to be a different hue and saturation to the base colour. For a bright sunny day image such as this, I'd recommend pushing your shadows to more purple/blue-ish hues and making them more saturated than the base colours. I'd also recommend making your highlights warmer, less saturated versions of your base colours rather than just using white.
I also feel that you could have gotten away with another level of shading here, perhaps making some of the shadows a bit deeper. A good way to check that you're getting a nice range of values in your work is de-saturating it. Don't be afraid to use a full range of value from black to white!
Another general tip I like to give is that you can vary the thickness of your lines and use colours other than black in order to make the image pop a bit more, but that's up to stylistic choice and isn't necessarily better.
Hope this helps! <3
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I consider the colors I shade with not to be black, but to range from a dark blue/indigo to a slightly lighter and more saturated one depending on the strength of the light, but enough people have brought that up that I think I should just up the brightness/saturation of my shadows in general. Likewise, I did use a second shading layer, but if you didn't see it in places like the right girl's face (where her hair makes more shadows) or the guy's armpits, it's probably too subtle.
Regarding line weights, I was using them for a while but ultimately stopped because they seemed to be making my characters too cartoony and discordant from my backgrounds, and I think for me they're a crutch to make me feel like I don't have to worry about accurate shading and textures, which I really need to improve on. So I don't think I'll start using them again soon, but the reason you bring them up is a good one.
As for the wings, I've never drawn feathers before and so I kinda pushed them to the end and rushed through them, but thanks for the tutorial and the advice on which kinds of tutorials to seek out! I dislike getting stern advice from tutorials and having it turn out to be wrong or not widely accepted.
If I can ask another question, how distracting is it that the characters' eyes are more cartoony than the rest of their bodies? For me that's partially a personal stylistic choice and partially wanting to err on the less realistic side for faces so they don't come out uncanny-valley (the "kawaii desu" big irises a lot of artists use are also something I sprint away from as fast as possible, to the point of being unrealistic in the other direction), but I worry the result just looks weird and unprofessional, not like a style.
Thanks for the detailed and honest review! It mystifies me how almost no one's commented on this compared to my other pics, even other non-fanart ones.
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I like this style and how the people look. The mountains seem to match the style of the people somehow.
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I think the mountain and thew sky are the best part, from the preview it looked like you drew on a real photo: your work paid of in the end. Also, you inserted well the characters into the environment, taking time to shading them. Only one quick detail, I think that yellow path in the bottom becomes narrow too soon, it stretches the perspective
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That's probably true; I did kinda rush the path at the bottom. Appreciated!
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