Portrait

[Bonedaddycash]

I got a Wacom for my birthday this year, and have spent the last week or two playing around with it. This is my first fully finished, fully digital piece of art. It's a portrait of my fiance done from a photograph. What does everyone think?

[lordarka]

I'll take a stab at it. Congrats on the Wacom by the way... life will never be the same. There seems to be problem with the anatomy of the upper arm on her right; it's too thin. The shadows overall are too flat. That may the result of using a reference photo that was captured using the camera's built in flash; those flashes tend to generate the least shapely light, given their close positioning to the lens axis on the camera. What you end up with is a reference that has flat and boring lighting, and your own piece follows suit.

There are some problems in the face; it looks like she doesn't have an eye under the hat there, since the shadows don't really shape the contours of her face. The eye that is visible appears too small, and too far from the bridge of the nose. The nose shapes are themselves elegant, but there's no dimension there... Also one nostril is higher than the other relative to the upper lip. The upper lip in turn seems too large.

The texture detail on the hat ribbon and the hair are well done, but you would benefit, I think, from looking more closely at the anatomy before delving into the detailed rendering. A drawing with great detail rendering and unnatural anatomy is generally far less effective than a looser drawing in which the anatomy is accurate and the forms well defined. The first place I would start is by shooting a more interesting reference photo of your lovely fiancé, or alternatively, convincing her to sit for you while you draw.

Hope this helps!

Arka C.

[Bonedaddycash]

You're right of course. Thanks for all of the pointers, I'll have to drag it back in to photoshop and work on it some more. I did this all yesterday. I had been doing some really challenging stuff I could never do on a computer before, so I wanted to do something I could actually see finished in a fairly short period of time. I probably rushed it a bit in a few spots due to my excitement.

[pauscorpi]

i like the mood of the piece and the style but i agree with the previous post; the piece would definitely benefit from a more dramatic lighting

my suggestion os this - you have already established your light source and lighter and darker areas (though shyly so ) so why don't you just play with them : make the lights lighter, exaggerate them or add more subtle midtones that you don't necessarily see in the photo