in gimp as usual. From the same set as my last two threads. http://i.imgur.com/GmeFo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/C0iz5.jpg CnC greatly appreciated.
Oh my I love them. You did really good! Do you plan to do anymore to them? They look great as they are.
You have partially covered up your two characters with light reflections in the first one and smoke in the second. In my humble opinion, you should try to keep that at a minimum, as it kind of takes the viewer's attention away from the characters that are supposed to be the very thing you want to show us. Also, nice composition in the second image. However, the first one is a bit odd. I can't really tell what Crystal-Guy is doing, and he's kind of small considering it's a picture of him. I can see that you want to show off the whole character, but just keep in mind that sometimes you can make more dynamic images by only showing part of them, like so: I generally like the second one of the guy with the bow, but if I were you, I would crop away maybe half of the space between his head and the top of the drawing. Feels weird to have such a big open space with nothing in it.
I might edit them a bit, but the overall structure will probably remain the same. I understand what you mean with your first point, however, I only added the layers above the characters because I was toying with depth in these. I actually think the smoke turned out looking better with foreground in addition to background but the light rays could be toned down or altered to be less intrusive. I was kind of worried about how discernable the pose was because the crystaline body isn't very easy to look at and understand. I considered trying a heavier outline or differing shadows but in the end I couldn't make it work. As far as his size goes, this is zoomed out because here, the crystals around him are actually more important to understanding the scene I'm trying to convey, which I'll admit makes no sense out of context, and I couldn't make him larger without cutting them out since they are in front of him and all. As far as dynamism goes, I feel that I must have really missed the mark with this, because nothing in this scene is supposed to be moving at all. At most there would be an inward zoom in the camera, which I suppose I could use, but as things are it's just a snapshot instead of a full video.
OK, I see. Being able to easily read the pose is pretty important, though, and a frontal view makes this it hard to tell this one. You could try either chaning the pose or try making the drawing be from another angle. I usually do a few sketches from different angles to try and see what works. I'm assuming those shards are in front of him? It's hard to tell where they are when we have no frame of reference for their size, so I'd suggest drawing a few next to him that are smaller, so we can tell that the others are in front.
It's hard for me to select an alternate pose with this because I'm pretty married to the idea of keeping his back against the wall with the damaged limbs. I'm not sure what I'd do with alternate angles either, it's really hard to objectively pick these things apart when I basically just start drawing and then let it go from there. I'll probably just redraw it a few times until I'm happier with it. You're right about the crystals. I tried making the larger ones look farther forward, but it didn't work out.
