I for one am very glad that we have someone with your inspirations here.
see, here everyone tends to think a picture has to be either expressive and cartoony, or realistic and drab.
you stand somewhere inbetween, your pictures are still very expresive while they attempt to have a realistic shading. you dont really fall for the demoscene craze, and I bet dont really care about game styles.
you dont think in terms of KOF style, SF3, CVS, or SFA style and I think that's really great, we need to get away from such structures.
you know, a while ago I used to welcome very profusely anyone who didnt have the usual gameart backgrounds and came into the board, I guess the reason I didnt do it with you is because I had already seen several Dollers coming in and I'm almost used to it.
But you are a very level minded person and I am glad you are around here, looking at all of our art from a diferent place, I love the fact you think what we do is unnecesarily drab *thumbs up*
please post more critique! I'd love to see the kind of forward thinking you are showing us all in this thread spread all over the board, telling us to not be such pesimist monochromers
C&C
I was just comparing my photo with the guy...he is unnecesarily unexpressive and still looks more effeminate than me, not because I have tougher face features but because some of the details on him make him look like he has a secret fondness for makeup.
Helm's edit does have a boring expression, but that's because he made the guy squint. There's no reason to make him more unexpressive, I dont inhability to express yourself has anything to do with manlyness.
I think the best thing you could do is focusing on manly things that actually add expression
take some smoothness out of his face, subtly mark his cheekbones (maybe a shadow below them)
Take the exagerated shadow out of the surroundings of the eyelashes (how it's strongest at the part light would hit most directly makes it look like eyeshadow) and move it towards his eyebrows (make them a shade darker) thick expressive eyebrows are a very expressive manly feature.
I've been considering wether the pure white specular on his eye is bad or not, because it is usually a symbol of emotional vulnerability very much asociated with women, in model shootings they usually put these strange ring shaped lights just to really make those white speculars on the eyes unrealistically bright and eye catching to make them look femenine, but on the other hand it's not wrong for a guy to look like he has lagrimal glands, just something for you to chew on.
the dark pixel on the contour of the lower lip might be a bit much, a little speculars like what you have there is fine so they look naturally lively and wet but they shouldnt look so much like they're always in kissing position.