I'd like to finish this

[leel]

Hi everyone. 

PJ people might've seen this already, I did it for a challenge two weeks ago.  I was really short on time, so I soft of half-assed .. everything.  I'm pretty sick of it, but I took a little break, so maybe now I'll be able to look at it with fresh eyes and finish.



Things I'm gonna work on (tomorrow):

1. Try unify the face and turban more, though I'd prefer not to dither the face.. but.. I guess I'll see how that goes.
2. Colors: gonna add more, mainly to make the face less choppy  and to make the headwrap stand out a bit. 
3. Flaber gave me a ton of crits on the turban already, and I'm mainly gonna work on making the fabric seem lighter and less like a towel. 
4. Background?
5. Neck needs fixing, I'll have too look up refs, but suggestions are very welcome.

CC whatever you want; I have a week left before my classes start again, so I'll try to be productive.



And just in case someone didn't see this on pj, I traced a quickie sketch based on this reference.  It barely even resembles the ref, but thought I'd post it anyway.

[Joshua]

Nice. I'd like you to finish it too. I love the attention to detail on the turban- really impressive.

Though, I do love the detail on the hat, I think you could work a bit more on the form. Like I'd put another darker shade to help the flatness a bit.

Also, I like how you didn't follow the references to a T but gave yourself some creative freedom. Good stuff.

[Lee N]

2. Colors: gonna add more, mainly to make the face less choppy  and to make the headwrap stand out a bit.

You have plenty of colours already, start dithering to make things more smooth.

[tocky]

I agree on not adding more colours, disagree strongly about dithering. You can/shoud fix the face choppiness without resorting to either.

Here's a (few minutes of) edit that shows loosely what I mean:

I'll point also at big brother's stuff, because he's better at this than I am, and it might be useful.
http://www.pixeljoint.com/p/1891.htm

[leel]

I'll try to stay with 10 colors then, if you think it'll work.  But I really don't know what to do with the forehead and the side of the cheek + jaw.. they're just big boring blocks of color and make it look unfinished IMO..   The forehead is really killing me.

I agree the turban looks flat, especially the topmost pieces - I shaded it all too evenly, I'll save that for last XD


Thanks for the comments, let me know how I did with the edit.  Now I'm off to practice back parking. 

[leel]

I have another update:



I was trying to break up the big chunks of color, but now she looks older and kind of weird...  Should I go back to a smoother cheek+jaw?

[tocky]

I think the thing that's causing you the most trouble is that you're putting the darkest shadows and the lightest hilights on the same end of her face. The lights on her forehead, nose and cheek suggest that the light is somewhere just above/to the right of where she's looking - but the shadows around the temple and jaw would suggest that the light is off to the left a lot more.

A quickfix is to switch the hilights to the left side of her face:

(but that is inconsistant with the turban - probably it'd be less problematic in the long run to ease back on the shadows some).