Hazzard's Portfolio

[Hazzard]

It's been a long time since I posted my folio up for review, at least a couple of years and it's been updated a bit since then so here it is: http://hazzard65.daportfolio.com/.

Don't worry about hurting my feelings, be as brutal as you like I won't take it personally .

(One thing I am painfully aware of is the lack of work in my folio... feel free to reiterate that point as well)

Thanks guys

[Shorinji_Knight]

Your portfolio is great. I admit I had trouble coming up with anything to say other than great. I figured though that you posted you portfolio for critiques to help you improve, so I'm going to point out some minor observations I had looking through your work.

1. You don't have any story telling going on, but I believe that's because you're more focused on asset creation.
2. It looks like you use a lot of textures. They sometimes need to be a little more muted unless they're in the plane of focus.
3. I think your handling of light could be improved. Right now most of your values are mostly defined through brightness/darkness and not much by chromatic shifts. I'm not sure how to explain what I mean... It looks like you're painting in grey scale and adding colors through layer effects. In nature values have hue shifts across the spectrum.

[Hazzard]

Thanks for the feedback. Colour is certainly not my strong suit and when I am doing straight up designs I will often paint in grey scale first. You are absolutely right! The textures thing is a good suggestion as well... I'll definitely keep that in mind.

[Hitsu//San]

I dunno bud, i have the feeling that everything in your portfolio is outdated. You have something in every section that's far better than the rest and that's because it's been done recently. I think the best you can do is to put in there 10 to 20 images form the last 6 months and get rid of the rest. If you don't have that much stuff (non that's a great number though) it doesn't matter, but the old stuff is dragging down your level.


And yes Shorinji is right in every point, i think he's referring to color temperature in the last part isn't it man? The way a color shift to higher saturation when it is in darkness and to desaturation when it is in light, the natural way for a chromatic scaling yeah you don't have that because you paint in black and white and then you add colors at the end. I think you can improve that if you know the subject by using color balance and change your shadows and highlights to a natural degree and then adjust levels. Obviously the best way is to paint directly in colors but i certainly know that's not always possible in concept art cause you have to do things fast and you need to focus on design (so you can't pay attention to colors and chromas and everything else all the time) especially if you are not perfectly fine with this color thing, i had the same problem too. Another way is to learn two or three different cromas so you will always know what color is in the shadows, what color the main light will be and the general mood color, so you don't have to think about it all the time, i use this method too, it takes some times to feel comfortable with though.

The whole thing about textures anyway is cause you are using them in the wrong way. As i can see most of the time you use textures like matte and not to give more details to something you've already painted. That's wrong if you don't have the same density level in your painted stuff because what you've painted gives the impression to be cheap in contrast of a photo density thing on the screen in that case. You must add texture to something that you've done to add details, that way your painted stuff will have a higher density so it will give a strong visual impact.

I think i've said pretty much everything, if there's something else i'll let you know or just ask so we can talk about it

[Hazzard]

Yeah, most of my designs begin in grey scale and for a long time I suffered with this lack of richness in colour. As you rightly pointed out my newer stuff shows the progress I've made in regards to colour, thanks for pointing that out .

As for the textures, it's certainly something I can improve on... I will usually use the hotspot method but I guess with some of these I need to make sure that the texture pass adheres to this same hotspot that the values are defining. Thank you