WIP Need help making it awesome.

[Nhaywood]

Hey guys this is my first post in this forum so I'm excited and nervous to get your feedback. You can be and i urge you to be brutal to me. I cant be babied and i can take it. That's the only way I'll get better. This piece isn't turning the way i envisioned in my head and i was frustrated trying to find the right color for the mood or the type of right color on the skin of the characters. I'm using the lighting bolt as a light source and trying to make it seem this blindingly bright. I made the lighting bolt have a purple look but if you know a better color for lighting please let me know. I'm also not very good at building and do not know how to make them look unique. My characters could stand out better.Well that's all the things i can think of that i want to improve but i know there more. This is my final assignment for my digital media 2 class. I have one more week to work on this so ill have enough time to add your feedback to the drawing and re post it for another critique. Thank you all for taking the time to critique.

[Trase]

You can be and i urge you to be brutal to me. I cant be babied and i can take it. That's the only way I'll get better.

It's way too early for you to do any color. You need to start with basic perspective lessons, and I mean drawing simple cubes and objects (the sidewalk on the left doesn't use perspective, the tiles are unevenly placed, the cop car is flat). Then (not in this order specifically, but many good artists I know did it that way) [*click*you should do some life drawings of objects around your house to learn how to construct objects and how light interacts with them.] [Then you move on to anatomy, learn how to construct human body and how light interacts with it.], do some life drawings of landscapes to learn how values interact 'in the big picture'. [Detail doesn't make the picture realistic, correct values do.] It's not a weekend job, nor a months job. You need to study and draw every day for a long time (depends on the person, may be 6 months, may be 2 years) until you can make [beautiful black and white drawings with graphite/coal or any other similar medium.] If you mastered that, it's time to start learning color... That's a whole different chapter and my post probably will not be around your attention by that time so I won't bother explaining (plus I'm not yet at the color stage myself )
There are some wonderful books that help you learn all this stuff, but someone else should name them because I don't really remember.

In the end, it's all about how much do you want to be an artist. If you want to become a true master you should not run ahead of yourself, but instead master each set of skills individually and fully before proceeding to the next step. If you skip ahead to the "interesting" parts without knowing under-the-hood stuff, you will have results like the one you just posted. I wish you the best of luck!!!

[Avvatar]

My advice is put the tablet away and start with the basic drawing fundamentals. Everything from your anatomy, perspective, color theory, composition etc... needs a lot of work. There are many stickies at the top of the critique forum that include links to good study materials that will help you out.

But since you have to have this finished, the first thing I would suggest is lower the horizon line near the bottom of the page. It takes 15 minutes to learn one point perspective, just google it and apply it to your painting. At the moment everything looks flat, like paper cut outs so try and create volume using lighting. This is partly because you don't understand drawing with structure and because of the horizon line being so awkwardly placed as mentioned. The story is unclear. Why is he shooting at a random building with a ray gun and why is lightning hitting the exact same spot? Next time you should thumbnail your drawings and post them before going on ahead to painting, would have saved you a lot of time fixing things.

[Nhaywood]

Thank you for your feedback. Yes i do understand i need a lot of work but i am not giving up. I took perspective class but i struggled in it. At the time i was all in to characters and never focused on environments and buildings. I bought a sketchbook and this summer i plan on drawing buildings none stop till its stuck in my mind. The reason i struggles with value is that the lighting bolt is messing me up. I never done a drawing with a intense light source so thats why my value may looks confused. I'm not sure how bright it would be when the lighting strikes.
Thanks Trase!

[Nhaywood]

Next time you should thumbnail your drawings and post them before going on ahead to painting, would have saved you a lot of time fixing things.

I will post a thumbnail next time. This post was a spur of the moment kind of thing. Well i was trying to make his gun work like where ever he points to he can send lighting bolts that direction so that why i kinda added the red laser thing but i can see it cause confusion.

[Avvatar]

Lightning doesn't work the way you've depicted it, get some reference. And wouldn't it be easier for the gun to shoot lightning?

[Stoat]

I have no idea what's going on here. The building behind is cracked open and on fire. There's lightning that is somehow being intercepted by a ray gun. This is somehow blowing the gunner and people thirty feet behind him in all directions. But not Cool Guy in the foreground (whose index finger is making a bad tangent with the sidewalk back there, incidentally).

Well. It's an assignment and you have a week, so you gotta rock and roll. One thing that might help is doing a quick rough sketch on a piece of scrap paper of what this would look like looking straight down from overhead. Because Cool Guy looks too far in front of the ball of lightning to be seeing it at all, and the people in the background look too far in back to be blown around by it.

[Symson]

I agree with the previous comments.

You say you have troubles with buildings. I suggest going out side and taking a photo you can use as reference.