Comment on Wild Heart by Yubria

TwilightSaint's avatar
Background/General critique on the double! (As requested in the Critique Requests. :D )

Wow! You're right - she is a beautiful character! And you captured her free spirit in her expression, gesture, and...everything! The way you made the wind blow her hair, the grass, and the clouds is really effective, too. :D

I like the sketchiness of it - gives it a more relaxed feel, methinks.

One thing to learn about backgrounds, (and I'm learning this, myself,) is learning how to finally tighten them all up. For example - working in the mountains, clouds, whatever else all in a fuzzy airbrush. For some pictures where you want the subject to retain just about %100 of the focus, this works out, and then, if you are so inclined, you can go over the basic forms of the background with a smaller airbrush, and then a smaller airbrush, and so for until you obtain your 'blur' of choice. Just one way of working it out.

Another way to help tighten up backgrounds is getting rid of the lines. I do this a lot - I keep the subject/focus with lines, and then I make the background lineless. Sometimes adding lines on the background kind of musses up things. For example, the grey outlines on the clouds. I'm not saying they're mussed up, no! I'm just saying that, perhaps, maybe a really bright white outline would have made the white caps in the clouds stick out better. Especially how you have them built up - the dark grey, the grey, the white and then the!...grey? It kind of puts a halt on the effect, if you know what I mean. :)

The mountains, too - yes, they're mountains! The shading on them is very well done, but in some places the lines just look out of place. Like on the slopes where the lines kind of squiggle out and such - they kind of ruin the effect of a steep mountain slope.

I gotta say, though, I do like that grass - the lines work very well here, ha-ha! ^^ One thing to do, though, that can make them really pop out - you can add some really bright greenish/yellow highlights on the more prominent blades - this can make the grass look thicker and shinier. :3

Like I said earlier, the overall mood of the piece is very settled...and I like how it's done! Another thing you could add would be a slightly darker bluish-grey gradient to the sky. This could help the overall piece in that everything is all nice and sketchy and shaded and then some clouds and SKY. It's just kind of this blue expanse that's just chilling out there, ha-ha. Keep the colours, but stressing them a bit can work wonders! :D

Overall, great job! The whole piece itself is really well done, and your centaur fits it perfectly! This'll make you an awesome background! (And ahhhh, the music of the Celts... :aww: )

~TwilightSaint~
Yubria's avatar
Thanks, that's pretty helpful, and I see what you mean about the lines and stuff. Although the mountains weren't intended to look steep- like [link] and [link] but not quite so tall. Again, thank you, I'll definitely keep all that in mind on my current project.
TwilightSaint's avatar
You're welcome! Glad it helped! :aww: