Learning to AA

[jennifuh]

http://jennifuh.deviantart.com/art/Summer-Love-126567182

So this is my first time doing AA .. I hope it's alright. I smoothed out some places.

Where else can I improve/fix?

Thanks. :]

[Opacus]

Mind posting your reference?

[jennifuh]

[Don risotto]

The picture looks great! Your AA looks pretty blurry though. You need to keep in mind when doing this manually, what your intention is for each pixel. most aa routines take varying amounts of samples from around each pixel to come up with some averaged value for the pixel being AA'd. they don't stray from that formula and they do what they do pretty well. So why do it yourself? You know more about the picture (and the point that you're representing with each pixel) than a simple algorythm can.   This here document "A pixel is not a little square!" Is possibly outdated but it goes a good way into various sampling methods and it really helped me understand more about AA.

edit ptoing: the link was messed up, fixed it.

[eckered]

double post 
dont really know what happened

[eckered]

quick 2 min edit;
took away like 3 or 4 colors, re-structured the face, etc. 

excuse me if im wrong, but frankly, this  looks like at least the palette was stolen directly from the reference. 

[TrevoriuS]

You are wrong there, it's well observed, that's all. You can see errors in the face, waist and elbows mostly. What I however lack in this image is lower arm muscles.

[jennifuh]

Ah, I wanted her eyes closed, unlike the original image. Her expression is a bit odd compared to the original.

Lol no, I used lighter skin tones and added more purple and blue into mine.

Thanks for the link! I bookmarked it and will read it. :]

Ouuhh, can you be specific about teh face, waist and elbows errors?

Her face looks a bit robotic yeah T___T Not good with muscles rofl.

[TrevoriuS]

Oh they're not necessarily a stain on the image or something ugly, they're just not correct compared to the photograph. So those were merely 'errors' compared to what you would have if you traced the image. It also seems deviant art won't load the image for me, so I'm afraid I can't look at it more closely for further feedback. I do think there's too much space between nose and upperlip, and the hair wrapped around the neck, coming over the shoulder from (our) the left is rather unreadable.

[st0ven]

Hey jennifuh, (this isnt a self portrait is it? </bad humor>)



So I think the problem i had with it the most was the face, but more particularly the neck. It looks like you were letting the reference guide you rather than using a solid understanding of how that area is constructed anatomically and using the reference to help form the exact position. So i had a go at forming up the collar bone a bit more closely to what it looks like in the photo, as well as fixing the neck area as it looked like there was a really bizarre tendon angle going on there. Brought in the hair in 'under' her face as it goes under her neck. gave the earrings a slight bend to them to give the influence there is a breeze influencing all things that are dangling.

The face i rearranged not really so much in its structure, just in its shading to hit certain points i thought you potentially missed (hell i dont think i got them all either) but perhaps it makes the face look a little less 'hard' to me?

Attached near the bottom with the red X's and green checks were some samples of smooth and rough AA work. Ill leave it up to you to interpret it how you can to fix your image, honestly i hate AA of largescale peices like this to the extent that i didnt have the patience to go through it all hopefully the examples help in some way.

When i first saw your image my first reaction was, "where's the source image' ? My next reaction from my initial impression was 'hey this has a nice realistic feel to it. looks very promising'. After looking at it again only did it really occur to me that the background is about 4 scales more simplified and generic than the character. Id love to see more attention paid to detailing the shore as well as you have done with the woman