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[jotapeh]

Totally saw that as a guy with his eyes closed and two unfortunate moles, haha.

[mooosh]

One thing I notice is that your illustrations don't have any gradient. If you look at JWK5's and pen's recent posts, for example, you see how they gradient from one color to another and how they use that to create volume and texture. Like on your right cheek(viewer's perspective), where you go from a highlight to a dark to a mid-tone of a different hue, back to a highlight against the nose. That implies a really strange form! Also the use of blues as a light against the sun and with skin in combination with your light gradients makes her skin seem metallic for me. The speculars on the opposite side of her face which are often against a dark tone contribute to that as well. That said, I think that face looks really really cool. Just not photorealistic.(I am assuming that is what you are going for)

Now, I need to stop being a nitpick and go practice.

I half way agree with this. I think what John's doing would look cool with, say, acrylic paint. John you should try working with acrylics.

[JWK5]

I disagree as well.

[kummerspeck]

I think it's more like the forms aren't well-defined enough, and there needs to be more contrast.  You need to allude more to shapes and etc to create dimension. JWK's pic demonstrates this a bit. Yours is very muddy, John, and the strokes are doing less to define form and more to cause flatness.

[wademcgillis]

Totally saw that as a guy with his eyes closed and two unfortunate moles, haha.

Can't unsee.

[JWK5]

John, don't play it so safe with your colors or try and get too realistic with them. Get crazy with the Cheez Wiz and experiment. Make an awful, clashing, colorful mess. See how many ways you can change (or screw up) a single work. Even if in the end you decide you'd like to keep your styling similar to what it is now at least you'll have explored a wide range of possibilities.



This are just some random variations I did. Not meant to be finished art, or "polished", just screwing around.





EDIT: I should also mention that I actually like what you are doing, it has a sort of cold textured expressiveness that I think smoothing and over-refining would diminish. A good example of what I mean is your last pic. While I do like Pen's modification of it a lot he turned it from a cold macabre beauty into something more like a fashion model and it feels like a separate character from the original altogether (and of course my edits deviated even further).

I think the styling you've got going has a great horror feel to it and I hope you keep moving towards and improving in that direction. When I say you shouldn't play it safe with your colors I mean you should try working in a greater range of colors into the skin, clothes, etc. (but not necessarily more saturated colors). You'll get a better idea of how to do that by just screwing around and experimenting.

[John Sandoval]

i love all of you

[ANtY]

Nice, looks a lot better than wip. But I still have that feeling that this skin looks more like flesh, not skin, dunno why (maybe the mix of whites and oranges?)

[Ashking]

Nice, looks a lot better than wip. But I still have that feeling that this skin looks more like flesh, not skin, dunno why (maybe the mix of whites and oranges?)

Yep, that's because skin is flesh.
John, I think maybe you should try shading with hue more than saturation. When everything fades to white like that, it makes the lighting look sterile and the figure look boring. Good other than that- though that's some pretty heavy eyeshadow.
I don't know why I'm giving critique when I can't draw for the life of me.

[ANtY]

@Ashkin: I meant the flesh under the skin

like you didn't know it

[Aquanoctis]

Muscle, then?

@john And that is looking much more improved than the first version already. I know I'm probably just spouting out old art-isms here, but don't worry if you make mistakes too much as you are learning. It's not always about making a pretty picture, like JWK said, it's about experimenting. And if you're not making mistakes when experimenting, then you're not experimenting right! :D

[st33d]

I actually really like John's "fashion illustration" style for his character designs.

I would recommend practising in charcoal first to get a handle on tone though. Painting is so tonally based that you need some strong skills in that area before you can work with colour to get the warms and colds right.

[John Sandoval]

I actually really like John's "fashion illustration" style for his character designs.

did dragonmaw tell everyone how many vogue magazines i have on my shelf

[JWK5]

Speaking of fashion illustration, I randomly picked up this book at an art resource store (I have my own little library of all kinds of art books going, I add to it whenever I can). I really found it to be interesting.

[John Sandoval]

fixed a couple things here based on suggestions from various internet people (pen, dragonmaw, jwk etc.)

tried to make her look less 'flat' by adding more brighter highlights/darker shadows

also added more meat to her cheeks and raised her mouth/left eye a bit

also fixed her mascara a bit