NIKOLA TESLA, MAN OF SCIENCE

[Helm]

woo look at helm work on his wip and try to make sense of his strange color choice!

Early wip, critique welcome

oh my, almost forgot! reference used http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/electrical/tesla/pictures/misc/tesla1.gif although just eyeballing. Likeness is secondary in this piece. EXPRESSING THE AWESOMITY OF TESLA SCIENCE is the primary goal.

[Tremulant]

hehe cool. Very brave choice of palette. Dunno if I'd be able to handle it myself, but then, that's why you're Helm and I'm not.

A bit hard to crit at such as is, but what's been AA'd on the lightning's looking nice, as is the face itself. I'm digging the the forehead's shading, too.

That floating red pixel near the top is the highlight for me.

Oh yeah, good semblance too! (but the real Tesla had fancy-boy hair)

[Helm]

starting to take more shape

[Esker]

Looking good but I'm not sure about that ear.

[Rox]

I've always thought it's impossible not to love Tesla.

I've always thought it's also impossible not to love Helm.

[Helm]

enough for today, will finish this tomorrow.

[Turbo]

If it were up to Tesla, we'd have flying cars by now, and maybe less plane crashes. (i read he developed a way to transmit electricity through air over long distances, which is not being used today, i'm not really sure why).

Pretty awesome, the face and colors are nice.
I suggest not using the red on the right eye, makes that area look plain, i'd go with one of the darkest hair shades on that. Also, you shouldn't use the same red tone to shade his skin on the right that you used on the collar, since the collar is black and his skin is white: maybe add another shade or use that brighter red that you're using on the highlights.

If you change your mind and want to get closer to the original, make his face rounder by making the left cheek bones more pronounced, and the profile less straight (adding a curve, moving more to the left), make his nose bigger (also, moving it to the left) and make the eyes bigger too. Shouldn't be too much of a change from what you have, not too hard i think. Also, i think the left eye (our left) may be a bit too high up, but it's too soon to say from what you have.

Oh, and that sweet sweet shading on the (bottom) lighting bolt, i like that . Please, do use it on the other bolts.

[lief]

hi hjelm
tesla is nearly as ossom as chuck norris.  the lightning reminds me of that other big piece you were working on that you also gave up on.  very cool.  chin has more thrown light, try doing that to the cheek and it will add volume to an otherwise fairly flat plane.  maybe the hair could have some highlights or light semi-occluded through the strands.  any way of drawing the coolness of his oscillator work? a vibrator by tesla could give the earth an orgasm.

[Helm]

Turbo: great critique, I will follow much of your advice tomorrow. The "since the collar is black and his skin is white" bit makes no sense from where I'm standing, though, and therefore I'll leave the red be. My whole approach rests on multiuse of colors in improbable places. I won't try to achieve likeness, I've gotten a pretty sharp edgy head that reminds me of Hitleric propaganda imagery which I find fitting for this sort of thing, and adapting until Tesla's slavic countentance is captured doesn't interest me much. This is 'Telsa the uberman' not 'Tesla the neurotic genius who when once kissed recoiled in horror and never touched a woman to his death'. I'll do all the tesla coil tendrils with as much care as the lower one, yes.

glief: nice use of 'also'. I'll attempt more light on cheek and see if it works, good idea. I intended to do hair highlights. Not sure about his oscillator work and how it can be incooporated into this design, any links or ideas? I like orgasms.

[lief]

try this, hjelm. http://www.intuitor.com/resonance/

tesla was the actual inventor of radio
also invented first radio controlled robots

I must say, this jumped out at me:

Tesla attached a small vibrator to an iron column in his laboratory

The police fingered Tesla because they had frequently responded to complaints about his unusual activities

harsh, though sexual, treatment by police...

no ideas how you could incorporate it. make him blurred and add comic-book jiggle lines to his head?

[Conzeit]

hahaha, I love that. I've been waiting for you to take your hueshifting out of desaturated tones, hope this turns out well.

First of all, I just dont think what you want to express with the pixels is in the photo in the least.  I feel like you're trying to force that "intuitor" angle into a photo where he was just trying to look like a nice guy for the camera.

you say likeness isnt that important, but generally these pixels dont really make me think of intuitivity at ALL,  you just sort of grayed out the eyes and I see no expression in them whatsoever. as far as I'm concerned this might as well be some uptight 50's general or something.

in the photo the eyes are directly engaging the veiwer, they hit me in two waves, when I first look at them a compasionate kind vibe hits me, but when I look a little deeper the second wave hits me and I see a very introspective mind.

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/images/ts_h_right.jpg I think this one fits the mood you are going for much better. it is more about his introspective aspect, even though you can still tell he's the same compassive guy.

I think by avoiding the commitment of likeness you basically avoided any depth the portrait could've had, because it just doesnt have a distinct personal gesture, which the real Telsa portraits do really have.

I dont know what kind of crit that is, but that's what I think and care about with this piece.

[Darion]

I still don't get it, even after reading your 5 paragraph replies every so often. Hopefully - one day - I'll understand how to get these trippy palletes.

I don't really notice anything thats too crucial to mention. Looks great.

[Faktablad]

I think part of the fact that it doesn't look as Tesla-ey as it should is his outfit.  The question is: are you going for a motorcycle gang leader, or quaint late 19th century scientist?

[Turbo]

The "since the collar is black and his skin is white" bit makes no sense from where I'm standing, though, and therefore I'll leave the red be. My whole approach rests on multiuse of colors in improbable places.

Just stating that, as you probably know, if you shine a red light on a white object, the red will be reflected fully, making the object appear in the same red; while if you do the same on a dark/black object, the light will be absorbed by it and that object will appear at a darker red. This is all assuming that the red here is a secondary light source, which might very well not be - a possibly trippy use of colors, and fine at that.
Now that i look at it again, the surrounding grey shades of the reds in the collar and in the cheek skin do make these reds appear of different values. I'd give it a shot on brightening the skin one anyway. Do tell me if i'm completely lost here, please

[Crazy Asian Gamer]

Impressive work as always, Helm.
(I love your oily robot men).
Those painterly strokes also gets me. Damn.
I would rally for moar colour though. I mean, you've got plenty color, but bring out the individual colors just to the point the palette doesn't collapse from it. It'd make the desat. colors slightly more interesting than in its current slightly-more-interesting-than-gray state.

Tesla is nearly as burnination-kaboom-clamationmark as Bruce Lee. But then again, Bruce Lee 0wnz Chuck Norris, so meh.

Oh, and LIEF's BACK!!! (I shout with frank glee.)

[ndchristie]

Please note that, if i thought you needed gushing praise this piece earns it in full amount, but my understanding is that you value critique more than anything, and im sure a piece as good as this will earn more than enough praise to float any man's ego.  so with that being said, here's my critique.

Helm, you have a wonderful sense of color that in my opinion is not demonstrated in this particular piece.  perhaps you could explain why you chose the hues you did?  Keeping your goal in mind, they appear entirely arbitrary, almost counter to that idea, and that leads me to feel as though you were trying to force a different relationship between the colors that simply does not exist.  the combination serves to provide the portrait with a complete lack of life.  Also, in every picture i have seen of Tesla, there is a quality that exists in his eyes that this portrait does not capture.  Though the man in the picture looks like tesla, he also looks dead, inside and out, and that is something that i simply dont associate with a man like Tesla.  my suggestion is to perhaps change the colors of the face not only to be warmer and more alive but to have a better relationship with the other colors, but most importantly though i think something in the eyes need to change, personally i think he should be looking at the viewer, as at the moment he is looking away and down as though he has been in some way defeated.  If this was your aim i applaud you, but from looking at this piece i do not feel that it is 'EXPRESSING THE AWESOMITY OF TESLA SCIENCE.'  Pieces that are technically brilliant can still fail in their goal, and i dont wish that for anyone, especially not someone with your talent and a piece executed with this level of skill.

good luck, its an awsome piece you have here, especially for the timeframe

[sonic_reaper]

Hm, who am I to critique?  It is you who could teach me a thing or two (or three or four ...) 

[Blick]

i read he developed a way to transmit electricity through air over long distances, which is not being used today, i'm not really sure why

He'd need a giant coil to do so, how he set it up would work, but I won't go into what little I know about the setup since... I know little. I remember one reason it's not being used is that the coil itself would be so large that it'd just be impractical to build. Also I'm sure it'd be more difficult to track and control and we don't want electrical companies getting any more cofused or losing any money :\

There's actually a way to basically create an electrical field on the land and you would be able to stick a stake into the ground and basically plug into dirt. The only problem is that, again, it'd be impossible to regulate since anyone with a conductive spike and an appliance needing electricity could plug into the ground, and we don't know the long term effects of living in an electrical field. Since the frequency of the waves would be so high, it should just be able to travel around us, rather than through us and the whole resonance thing happening, which should mean that there'd be no harmful effects. It's still a bad idea to live in an electrically charged world though. Who knows what sort of things would happen and to what extent. Some college students down in the lower 48 demonstrated it at half time of a college football game and it worked perfectly though. Information here may be wrong, so anyone feel free to correct me if it is.

As far as the art goes, I'd like to see more definition in the eyes. A bit of highlight would be nice, doesn't have to be too strong though. The blank space there seems awkward to me, especially on his right (viewer left) eye, since it's in the lighted side. I'm really loving the red ambience, by the way. I feel the transition from red to the greenish gray hues could be smoother. The area around his mouth and chin in particular.

[Xion]

http://www.teslasociety.com/teslacoil.htm
Yeah, Blick, I dunno if I'd wanna live near one of those.

Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.

If he'd been around long enough he would've made force-fields, lightsabers, and mind control devices...and phazers and just about any other science fiction reference.


Nothing I have to say about the art hasn't been said before. Eyes. Cheek. Yeah.

[ptoing]

Very nice. Apart from more aa i got no crits. I think on some of the thin lightning bolts you should break the lines with the aa

X=aa

000X
.....X000

stuff like this.

[Helm]

First of all I want to say thank you to everyone that gave me serious crits, but more thank that saying, the fact that I'm going to deviate from my original construction for the art (which means I was defeated by argumentation!) says more about the quality of the critique recieved here than words do. I understand that there's not a lot of technical critique to give me most of the time, so this thread is mostly style and intention critique and I'm find with that. I agree with some, begrudgingly accept others, and disagree with others, as is usually the case and this is good.

Now that i look at it again, the surrounding grey shades of the reds in the collar and in the cheek skin do make these reds appear of different values.

This is the desired effect.

I would rally for moar colour though. I mean, you've got plenty color, but bring out the individual colors just to the point the palette doesn't collapse from it. It'd make the desat. colors slightly more interesting than in its current slightly-more-interesting-than-gray state.

As with the other color crit, I'll try marginally more saturation but don't forget the pure dark fullsat red is covering this end more... maybe I can make it work. It's true that most of the hueshift tricks work because colours don't have a lot of saturation, but it's a bigger challenge to liven it up and still shift it like a madman, so that's something to try.

Please note that, if i thought you needed gushing praise this piece earns it in full amount, but my understanding is that you value critique more than anything, and im sure a piece as good as this will earn more than enough praise to float any man's ego.  so with that being said, here's my critique.

No, I'll enjoy the praise when this is done. What I need is critique like what you gave me, so thank you.

perhaps you could explain why you chose the hues you did?

Sure it's not a big theory. Representing every part of the colorwheel. This all comes back to when I did a CG portrait based on photo reference and realized that there's BLUES and GREENS and YELLOWS on a simple ambient-lit face, due to a lot of complicated color effects. Looking at Cyclone art and the like I've decided to try to represent lots of subtle or harsh hue shifts in small spaces, with a lowpoly-to-dithering approach I first developed on 'masters of nebular frost' and I've done a few pieces using the same theory as this which you might have seen. This isn't any more or less random than the rest of my hueshifted stuff. This may be quite more in the eye of the beholder than it has to do with me. Consider if this was the first hue-shift piece you saw by me, and tell me if you'd still consider the color selection inferior to the rest.

Due to a lot of critique concerning the eyes, I've decided to give him whites for the eyes and generally make that part much more intense and vivid. I was trying to get away with the simple approach because doing eyes is difficult! I guess no such shortcuts.

Ptoing: breaking up the line is not a good idea for lightning effects. They're not tree-brances.




Almost done. Time for the extra nitpicky wave of critique before this is finalized.

[Mr.Modem]

Awesome as always Helm! This piece has Bitmap Brothers written all over it. I love the sharp highlights and the dithering. When I see this I can almost imagine Tesla running around in The Chaos Engine. Most of the problems have already been pointed out already so I'm not going to give much critique. Crazy Asian Gamer made a good point about the colours though. This piece would look so much better if you make the colours more saturated. I mean look at Cyclone (I think everyone have already seen this picture but...) http://www.gfxzone.org/personal/cyclone/01/cyclone-ahne_pappa.html. He hueshifts and dithers like hell with saturated colours and still gets away with it. I say turn up the saturation and put in some extra colours to act like buffer shades.

[ndchristie]

beautiful.  those rusty and sandy colors you have now give him so much more life.  the extra care show to the form also helps a bit.  would love if he could be looking at us, but this is still gorgeous.  especially digging the pink in the lightning, though i wonder if the lightning is too segmented in its hues? (there are very clear orange sections and pink sections, but perhaps this is intended)

[Rox]

Good call, lightening the eyes. I've noticed that eyes have to be the most reflective object in the whole dang world. If someone's standing in pitch-blackness, and there's just a hint of light anywhere in the room, the first place you'll see it is in their eyes. Second, possibly the contours of the face start to stand out. It's actually kinda freaky to observe someone's eyes in different environments, because there always seems to be a really bright highlight in at least one or two spots...

Anyway, about saturation... I did my trademark Photoshop experiment on this, and can't say I agree. Saturation doesn't make this specific piece more interesting to look at. The lightning got a nice flare to it, but stole attention from the face, even at +60 saturation. The only thing happening to the face was that the dithering stopped working and looked gritty. The whole thing would have to be completely remade for a color shift to work out, I think. Besides... it's Helm, this. He knows what he's doing.

One last, interesting thing I just realized... The red shading against the pale grey skin makes me think of Soviet...

[ndchristie]

Mr. Modem, its interesting that you associate hue shifts with the bitmap brothers, since i dont really remember them doing much more than smple bichromatic colorings, and much of it was all the same hue.  They did use 2 different colors to shade some things, but as hue shifts go, speaking as a painter and a pixel novice, thats still astoundingly simple.  perhaps i am wrong? (set me up with the links if i am, i wanna see )

this is the kinda stuff i associate with the bitmap brothers
http://amigos.amiga.hu/ancientoys/screenshots/chaosengine1.jpg
and thats not really hue shifts at all, its simple 2-color blending

[Mr.Modem]

No bitmap brothers didn't use hueshifts, you're right about that.When I talked about the Bitmap Brothers style I meant the sharp highlights, the dithering and some other shading stuff that's hard to describe. I guess it's Helm's style

EDIT: BTW I edited my last post so there is no more confusion.

[Nix]

i dont like his right eye (our left) but i cant see why sorry for not being able to help much . heh

[Helm]

done, I guess

[Dhaos]

Very beautiful helm. As always your level of detail and coloring is amazing! I could be wrong, however, wouldn't that level of lighting (the electricity~lighting bolt) cause larger areas of the face to be white? Even still I guess it doesn't really matter. *saves and puts into helm folder*

[David]

It could be far back or just a design element.

[Zach]

i love this too death but that nose just bothers me, idk why though

[Billeh]

Very nice work, Helm. His left eye (our right) Bothers me though, seems a lil large IMO Or maybe its to close to the edge of his face.. To me the nose looks fine though.

[Xion]

It looks like the bridge of his nose has a cut across it. In the references, I don't think I saw a cut.
Great, as always.

[Helm]

yes, there's no cut on the cheek either, artistic license