Victorian girl

[Mathias]

She looks human, right?

[Puppet]

She's look human till you hit the hands.
In my opinion I feel her hands look like a wooden puppets (Ironic I say that due to my username) I think if you stroke the brush gently and not such a bold colour outline in her hands it wouldn't look so wooden like maybe.
Take a picture of your hands and compair it to hers, you'll see that there is no sharp line sighting when holding a flower like that. If that makes any sense.
She's getting there man!

[Mathias]

Haha puppet, that's just WIP-ish contour lines I drew to giude me while shading them and also to remind me of each finger segment's perspective while I "wrap" each finger with a lacy glove material.

[Puppet]

Haha My bad.
Wasn't sure if you were keeping them in or not. So I thought why not it could be useful.
I look forward to seeing the lace gloves.

[Joe]

You should consider making the face less wide.  I know she's looking down, but I'm talking like 95% of the width it is now.  Also, the area underneath her chin needs some attention.  But this is looking really good, man.  I've always liked your style.

[Ryumaru]

Since you name dropped me in the creativity thread, I felt obliged to give a crit




Anatomy:
Mostly alright. The face is too wide, too symmetrical. The features are more symbolic than they are actual 3-D forms. Abuse the reference. It's done in the professional world and you can do it too. Shoulders a little too wide, even with clothing. I did no better on the hands in my edit but you're thinking too much about line. Think planes of light and how the fingers are more cylindrical, and how each one actually has a slightly different axis upon which it curves. Breasts are a bit too low and flat. With the face, unless it's imperative to keep both eyes I would seriously recommend the hair swoop. It's what 17 year old gothic girls do and it creates a very elegant and interesting silhouette shape to the face. More asymmetrical

Color: Where has your knowledge of pixel art gone? We don't use straight ramps in pixels and we shouldn't in paintings either. Reflected light is all around us. We are governed by one primary light source*usually*. Even beyond realism a palette should be harmonized.

Values and Edges: The value structure of your piece works well enough. You contrast the dark hair with the light background and the same with the clothing next to the neck and the arms in front. The cloth may be flat, but it's being twisted and turned in a 3- D world. Make it look that way. Most edges are uniformly hard. Edges must be controlled to amplify a focal point, and to turn forms and give the eye rest. Currently the rose and patterns are not in the same world as her- but I assume you'll fix this when the time comes.

Composition: I believe you said it's for a book? It's simple, stuck in the center, but it's fine for what it does. Looks " monumental" and everything looks to or points to the center of interest ( rose)

[Mathias]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Ryumaru]

[pistachio]

My best guess is it was a burst of uncontrollable rage or confusion at not getting the picture down perfectly, or your edit scared him. Probably the former. How should I know?

Anyway, please note I'm nowhere near an expert at faces, let alone anatomy. (In fact I generally consider myself an amateur at this stage.) But I think Ryu hit the nail on the head regarding the face (note: asymmetry! Makes things interesting in a picture like this, just not too much). Most of my problems regard the lighting and rendering. Ryu did make some improvements there, but overall:

Cloak casts some shadow on the wrists and shrouds parts of the body in overall shadow.

Shoulders seem broad; perhaps pinch them in a bit, the way ErekT did it?

Highlight on breasts is too bright. Overall I think they're oddly shaped, but Ryu took care of that too.

For some reason most of the shading is flat, actually, giving me the impression you worked with it at a rather zoomed-in level. My best advice would be to zoom out a bit, focus on the general shading before you move onto the details. For the face, it's alright to zoom in a bit, considering it's smaller than the rest of the picture. Also consider messing with the overall color values or something? Just for the eye-candy factor. But that would come last anyway.

...

[Mathias]

Chris, cannot thank you enough for doing that edit for me!!

Quite a present! And tremendously effective in illustrating your points. I'm just thrilled to see what you did with it!

I have A LOT of "itemized" feedback/comments on your wonderful edit, but I think I'll just let this image mainly speak for itself, for now. I need to get an update in here; been too long.

Deadline has passed, but I can't stop working on this thing 'till I'm at least 90% happy with it.



GO UPDATE:



(hair and dress still super-WIP)