ColdTurkey's Sketchbook of Hopefully Eventual Progress (Critiques [very] welcome!)

[ColdTurkey]

Hey guys! I've always admired this site from afar, and now I feel like I'm at kind of a standstill with my art. I really want to learn how to paint digitally in an efficient and skillfull way.

So I'm going to be dumping some [already finished and forgotten about] stuff and an extremely rough really casual comic project I'm working on, then two pieces I'm kind of working on and would love some critique/help with!


I'm going to post the two I want help with after the initial dump just for clarity's sake.


I'm still very new, so feel free to redirect me anywhere if this is the wrong place.

[ColdTurkey]

The first one I want to add helicopters and make it kind of look like a surreal rescue-type situation. The rocks look flimsy and the snow doesn't look very real to me.

The second one is just all off to me. The water looks unrealistic and so does the house, etc.

Help would be GREATLY appreciated

[KarylGilbertson]

Hey, you have some nice work here. A solid foundation on which to build.

I would like to ask what kind of work you'd like to do down the road? I ask because I would rather see you do more pieces with tone and 3d form, and move away from "comic lineart" but if you want to get into comics, then I don't want to push you in the wrong direction.

Your studies are quite nice, I'd like to see more. I think your first image, the figure painting, is the strongest piece in this thread so far. The brushwork could be cleaned up, but other than that I don't really have any criticisms, it's a very solid piece. More of those will really help you improve, plus folks around here love to see that kind of stuff.

Moving on to the pieces you'd like critique with:

The first piece suffers from confusion between positive and negative space. Basically, I am not sure what I am looking at. What will help is some kind of clue as to WHAT the background is... is it sky? More snow? Another related problem is your edges... You need your soft edges to be soft, and your hard edges to be hard. Right now, the edges right on the edges of the form seem to want to be hard edges, but you've painted them too softly. Clean up the edges and define the background and you'll see improvement.

For the second one, I can't tell where the horizon is, where the sea stops and the sky starts. Other than that honestly it's not bad. If you want to make the sea texture more convincing, go find some photo reference so you're not making it up from scratch.

Holy hell that was a lot of typing. Hope at least some of it was helpful!

[ColdTurkey]

Hi, thanks so much for the reply! I'm happy to get feedback so quick

Because I'm 'doing art' for more of a personal thing than for a career, I'm not really sure what I want to end up with. Right now, however, I do wish to focus more on tone and dimensions because I know I can work that into comics too (I've always loved drawing comics, etc since I was very young so I don't think I'd want to give that up).

Thank you for the nice comments on the first picture--that was probably the first time I ever tried to use a ref and paint something seriously so I'm glad it's not a total flop :p

Anyway I can see what you mean about the "mountain" picture--I'll try to make the sky more visible in the background, maybe color it? And I'll definitely work on making the edges more hard, too.

And for the second, I definitely noticed that problem myself when I was working on it. I'll definitely look at some refs.

Thanks again for your help!

[ColdTurkey]

I kinda updated the ocean pic, tried to make it clearer where the sky/water seperates and used a filter for the rain (for now anyway)

[ColdTurkey]

Another figure study. I can't figure out what's wrong with his face, though ): especially his eyes

[ColdTurkey]

A quick speedpaint

[ColdTurkey]

Some more recent(ish) works/sketches:

[ColdTurkey]

And some sketches from my latest life drawing session

[ColdTurkey]

another speedpaint

[alicetian]

My name is Amir, and I'm 18.I started to draw about 3 or 4 months ago.I decided to share my drawings here. please help me to get better at art.
any criticism is welcome.
the image below is one of my friends.