1 Jungle, 1 WoW inspired. Please look!

[CamStatic]

Okay, so I decided to post two more drawings here, since it's been a while since last time.

First one out is a jungle drawing I did for school project, just playing around with how to make the sunset look all warm'ish.

The second one is basically a christmas present for my boyfriend, a full tablet drawing that has my boyfriend's tauren warrior and my furry catform druid.

Please, let me know what you think!

[Seedling]

If that's a jungle, then it's a victim of deforestation. It needs more plants.

The WOW characters do read as WOW characters, but the technical parts of the drawing - hue, saturation, composition, line, etc. - are holding the image back. You need to spend some time drawing from life to build up a familiarity with these things before such a complex image is going to be easy for you.

You might perhaps be interested in the link in my sig called "Concept Art 101".

[evilkat242]

The first thing that comes to mind, is that shiney things reflect differently than soft things -- think of the difference between a metal teapot and a teapot made of felt.

You have two characters (one which looks suspiciously like it escaped from the Lion King!) which are covered in a light furring (soft surface, lots of refracted light.. like felt!), some very hard surfaces on the the axe and nose ring (shiney, specular reflections.. like a teapot!), and some medium surfaces of leather(?) or cloth(?) armour which are somewhere between.

I would definetly emphasize the technical aspects Seedling noted above. This image could use some anatomy work (arm lengths of the tauren, cat anatomy for arms and legs, faces on cat and tauren), details (armour is almost a single colour! tabard is even blank!) and shadows and light (pick primary light directions and stick with them!).

Read every tutorial in the tutorial section!

And most of all... practice!

[AdamDillabo]

did you use a lion king reference for the lion?

[SummoniX]

I agree with Seedling about the frst picture. It needs more vegetations. Perhaps u might want to add more shades/ to that green right in front of the mountains or jsut add more branches popping out of the pic as tha on the left.
And the 2nd pic needs more details imo.

ps your bf has really ubar gear

[digitalkarma]

ok ,,, i think that you are exploring some graphic style there, like vectorial style, but it´does´t matter what kind of digital thecnique are you usign, is the way you solve problems of composition and visualization.

[CamStatic]

Thanks for your replies, and sorry for being so slow on answering. My computer has been a headache the past weeks. :o
Gee, I really need a lot of practice, don't I? About my first drawing, I know the landscape looks sort of.. endagered. The real idea was to make it look sort of grassy and open plains-type of thing-, by the start of a jungle. That's what it turned out to be, anyways.
The REAL idea Was indeed to make a real jungle from above, but after several tries I just understood that it's not gonna happen. Nothing worked, nothing looked realistic. Do you have any ideas on how I can make a realistic, yet cartoonish simple rainforest-from-above? Any tricks? :o

Now the second drawing, I see that I should have made the armor sort of more shiny, and the fur more "fur-ish". I could have worked on this and maybe posted a second (improved?) version, but since it was late at night/morning when I was done with this, I managed to really screw up my save file, and now it's impossible to fix. Hate it when things like that happen!

Adam, when I draw cartoon style people and animals, they tend to have some of the same style as Disney. Too bad, really.. I'm a huge fan of cartoon movies, and I favourize Disney's artform the most. But, I must insist that "The Lion King" wasn't what I was trying to "copy" when drawing the catform Druid! I was just trying to cartoonize the druidform, but in my subconcious it appearted like a skinny Simba with horns. o_O ...He's cute though...right?

I will take your advices, and work more on making different surfaces, and have more patient to do more details. I know I can if I want, but keep in mind I had a 2 days deadline on the second drawing, so I just had to finish it 24th December. :o

By the way, the composition on my Tauren guy in the second pic; is it.. "right"? I know the arm to the right looks a bit too thin compared to the left one, but all over is his balance okay?

Thanks again for your replies! It really helps a lot!

[Seedling]

Sorry Cam, there’s no secret trick to painting a jungle from above, or a non-cartoonish lion, or an underwater intergalactic space-ship. It’s all a matter of starting at the beginning – doing art from observation – and working your way up to complex subjects from your head. You can try going directly to the complex-from-your-head stuff, but chances are you’ll just have one frustrating experience after another.