SY's concept art portfolio (for art school)

[ethmro]

Hello all, I'm a self taught artist trying to get into art school to study concept art. I know I don't have enough finished pieces (or of anything) right now. I'm still in the process of building up my portfolio for my apps and I'll add more as I finish more pieces in the next couple weeks. Here are some things I did recently, any feed back would be greatly appreciated. Also does anyone know what ratio of thumbs/sketches of designs to finished illustrations would be good to put in?

Thanks

[Shorinji_Knight]

These look pretty good! I really like the silhouettes. Your drawing and rendering skills are good. I have one criticism here... you have a tendency to paint all of your materials with the same matte finish. What I mean is that different surfaces reflect/defuse light in different ways. Your metal for instance, has the same highlight treatment as the tunic she is wearing. Right now you're just varying the values and chroma to differentiate your materials. What you need to do is a handful of studies of different materials under similar lighting conditions. You'll see that highlights are soft and subdue on matte surfaces but they're hard and spectacular on glossy surfaces. Proper treatment of the matte and glossy materials add up to much more believable lighting conditions, which will give your paintings more life.

[ethmro]

thanks for the feedback! yea... I should do more material studies and the point about doing them in the similar lighting conditions was something I haven't thought of before.