AuthorTopic: A portrait.  (Read 2325 times)

Offline Bollie

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A portrait.

on: September 30, 2016, 01:32:40 pm
So, i made this portrait a while back and i want to update it, just don't know where to start:

Any tips or critique?

Offline Curly

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Re: A portrait.

Reply #1 on: September 30, 2016, 02:20:18 pm
I would get rid of the black lines.
The hair looks a bit unnatural and the body looks tiny.

Offline Bollie

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Re: A portrait.

Reply #2 on: October 02, 2016, 07:02:45 am
Do you think it is better without the outline?

It still looks weird :(

Offline eishiya

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Re: A portrait.

Reply #3 on: October 02, 2016, 12:39:09 pm
It still essentially has an outline because of how heavy-handed your AA is. An outline-less drawing is one that uses boundaries between light and shadow and boundaries between colours to establish its forms and shapes, but you're still relying a lot on lines.

To make the lineless look work, you have to double down on the forms. In my opinion, a good sense of form is what was missing in the original anyway :]

- The neck appears to widen towards the bottom, like a section of a very long cone. Necks are a bit more complicated than that, it's more that the back widens (because of the trapezius muscle connecting the neck to the back and shoulders), and the front narrows. You could create this complex shape with the shadow. Just how much you show depends on how realistic you want the image to be. If you're going for a simplified, stylised look, then you should just show the neck not getting wider; you only need to bother with details like all the bits that stick out of necks in the front if you want a realistic neck. Because you're drawing it like a cone, the shirt also doesn't appear to rest on the neck and shoulders, it appears to intersect/clip through them instead. Try having the shirt go up a little at the back to look like it's going over the trapezius muscle.
- The hair casts a massive shadow over the forehead, but doesn't seem like it's meant to actually hang over the forehead all that much. This inconsistency looks strange. If it doesn't overhang the forehead, then just removing that huge shadow should be all you need. If it does, then you need to show that with the shadows on the hair.

Here is a paintover with the above implemented and the remaining outlines mostly removed:

The overly detailed neck is just to give you an idea of what's there. That level of detail is too much for the rest of the image, I think it looks better simplified. However, note that even in the simplified version, I left some hints of the "dips" at the edges of the shadows and where the shirt overlaps it, so it still feels detailed without the detail being drawn.

I also made a number of smaller changes all over the image to give it a little more definition, and made the skin shadow colours a little warmer. Hopefully this'll give you some ideas to improve your portrait!
« Last Edit: October 02, 2016, 12:41:07 pm by eishiya »

Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: A portrait.

Reply #4 on: October 02, 2016, 10:35:36 pm

One of the big things I noticed was that the face was just too tall. Skulls kind of tend to flatten out and hair only goes maybe half an inch past that unless you're specifically styling it for height, and this just looked to be kind of a crew cut type deal.
I also added some shading to the browline and tweaked the nose, and completely redid the mouth so it has lips and a chin!
The circle on the left is a guidepoint I used for the light, pay it no mind.
EDIT: I found a picture while browsing tumblr that has similar proportions to the face originally posted, if you want a less accurate ref for some reason:
« Last Edit: October 02, 2016, 10:41:48 pm by MysteryMeat »
PSA: use imgur
http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19838.0 also go suggest on my quest, cmon
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Offline Bollie

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Re: A portrait.

Reply #5 on: October 03, 2016, 03:32:47 pm
I edited, according to your great critique. Changed the shadows, made the head shorter and shoulders wider, corrected the face colors and other things :)

Now, the thing is, this is supposed to be my twitter avatar. How would i go about making it more readable when it's small?