Old V.S. New [FINISHED]

[Aleiav]

EDIT: Here's the final product. Not sure if I completely like it but... I can't really do the hair correctly.

[Aleiav]

Oh yeah, and if you're going to pick neither, I'd appreciate a reason why or some constructive criticism as to how to improve better. I know I'm sucky at color choice but it's hard to improve if I don't know how.

[Pawige]

I prefer the older one (on the right, right?) because the skin tone is brighter and more lively/interesting, the new one looks a bit dull and grey. The dithering on the old one is also less noticable.

I'd brighten second-darkest skin tone a tad, it's a bit too close to the next darkest and too far from the next lightest. Then maybe brighten the lightest color on the near cheek a bit, so you can use it to smooth out the places with the highlight color.

The hair isn't bad, but it could probably use some AA to smooth out those highlights, right now it looks rather messy. Perhaps one of the skin tones would be the right shade to smooth it out.

The lightest color on the far cheek looks a bit odd as it brings that cheek closer than the other one, maybe just hit the outline with the brighter color. The dithering of the highlight on the outstretched arm looks also kind of bad, the solid bits of highlight on the left of the picture look much better than the dithered ones on the right.

The area around the eyes could use some cleaning up--if you have a photo-ref I could do more specific crit.

You could also drop the darker outline on the nose, the highlight would serve to outline it just as well.

Might want to add a bit of shadowing under the lower lip, rather than a highlight.

I like the expression you captured, and the facial structure and proportions seem quite good.

[Aleiav]

Thanks.

I working on revamping the hair. I know it's crap but hair's never really been my strong point. I've looked at some pixels of hair and I'm going to try and fix it so it looks better.

I'm going to tweak with the pallate as well. Color theory is another one of my weaknesses but you've got to do what you've gotta do.

And what you mentioned about the highlight on the arm sounds reasonable, so I'll fix that.

And in case you'd like this is the photo reference.

[neverest]

when I look at them side by side My eye tells me to go for the old one because of the brightness, but I found using my hand to cover each of them over I much prefer the newer version for some reason.

[Aleiav]

Update taking various crits into account. I'm not sure about the hair. 

[sonic_reaper]

Her left cheek strikes me as being too light (the color);  the light source is a little confusing.  Hm, looking at it again, the cheeks themselves look a little out of place.  I never use dithering, so I dunno how I could help you there.

[Tremulant]

I like the new skin alot. It's very smooth, really well blended, and the tone is great. I honestly like the old hair better though, even if it does look a little messy. I think, like Pawige said, some AA on the old hair's highlights (or just on the old hair in general) could look pretty sweet. Right now it looks a bit... I dunno, plastic maybe?

[sonic_reaper]

I thought it was pretty lame at the time but my art teacher from highschool, this is one of the first things he taught us, taught us to draw hair in "chunks".  So instead of using a line to separate each individual strand of hair (thus making it look really messy/busy/compressed), use a few lines every now and then and stress highlights/shading over using lines to seperate strands of hair.  After all, we have tens of thousands of hairs on our heads, do you think it's realistic trying to draw each individual strand 

[Aleiav]

*nods* That does make more sense. Is there any sort of hair shading tuts you could reccomend? The only type of tuts I've had of those have been doll hair shading tuts and they sort of... teach you to do the 1 pixel hair strand thing in a way.