Hey! I took a look over the stuff on your portfolio (as well as the girl concept you posted here), and thought I'd throw in my own opinions. Feel free to take them or leave them!
- Personally, I wasn't really bothered by the anatomy. Could you use more anatomy practice? Sure, but I would say the same for any artist - more anatomy practice is never a bad thing - and none of your mistakes seemed that egregious to me.
- One thing eer mentioned that I do agree with regarding the girl concept is having purpose to the design, especially the clothing. Judging from the drawing on the left, she looks like a high school student. Think about who she is, what she likes to do, what defines her as a character, and show hints of that through the clothing she wears, the way she holds herself, and other bits of her character design. For all I know you probably have already thought of this stuff, but make sure to consider that when designing her.
- The first thing that popped out to me was the roughness of your non-pixel art. The concept you posted here is understandable - it's a rough sketch still in development, so I get that it's not refined and polished - but most of your other work on your site is a bit rough around the edges. There's unsteady, scratchy lines, or blobs of paint that don't do anything to show texture or define form.
- Another important thing to ask yourself is what your goals are. What kind of role do you want? What studio(s) do you want to work for? Do you want to make indie games on a small team, or be part of a larger project at a triple-A studio? Right now your portfolio feels a bit unfocused - judging from your work, it seems like you enjoy doing more stylized work and therefore probably aren't aiming for a triple-A studio, but otherwise I'm not really sure what your goals are. I remember having the same problem with my portfolio - I still struggle from it - when I first graduated, and mostly because college often doesn't give you the opportunity to focus on just one thing, and you're often pulled in many directions.
I feel like you've got a lot of potential. I would continue to think about your goals, and look at artists you admire and try and follow in their footsteps. It's definitely good to have your own voice and style, but I find it helps a lot to learn from people you really admire to help sharpen your technical skills and get you off to a running start.
Keep posting work! :D
Thank you so much for responding!
- Anatomy is definitely a reoccurring problem for me. I want to take more life drawing classes and have spent time this past summer trying to improve. It's mostly in the work of sketches and it's definitely been slow. I don't really know anyone who doesn't draw cartoons like I do so getting feedback on that sort of thing is sometimes difficult. I'm glad my mistakes don't seem that out of place to you, it's kind of like you said, I'm sort of trying to fall into my own "style," at least with this girl since it's a personal project and less portfolio based.
- Okay I understand this part. I got so focused on making the character look "good' so I could repeat drawing her, I left out a lot of the personality.
- I see what you mean with this, it's a problem I've noticed with myself. I'm assuming this is something that will improve with time as I draw more and become more conscious of it, especially with texture & form.
- Thanks again for looking over my portfolio. I'm planning on overhauling it during the next three months so I really appreciate the feedback. I realized it pretty unfocused so I really wanted to know what people thought of the content at least to see what sort of stuff is working and what things I should get rid of.
Thank you! I've been thinking about this a lot lately and sometimes I'm not sure. My focus in school was specifically on animation but as I was nearing graduation, I remembered how much I enjoyed games and illustration. I think I want to focus mostly on asset creation but I enjoy animating. I admire the skill of being able to convey ideas with concept art so I'm also interested in that....I'm not really sure. I studied Japanese for 2 years in college and am working on getting my fluency certification in 2017 so I'm also interested in the game industry over there (as well as potential U.S. branches), as difficult as that may be...
Initially, I wanted to work on mobile games and online flash games but from when I entered college 4 years ago to graduating now, the mobile game industry has transformed a lot and peaked in a lot of areas (like Facebook gaming) and mostly away from 2D in the U.S. with Flash slowly being phased out online. So my desired place has sort of shifted and it got me thinking more about what type of 2D art job I could pursue where my skills aren't rendered suddenly redundant. I haven't figured out the answer for this just yet.
I followed you on twitter! I hope that's alright, I recently started using it to follow artists and I think it's been helping in some regard to getting more inspiration.
Thanks again for your feedback!