CGTalk - Oiran

Lunatique

10-06-2011, 02:41 AM

For this type of decorative pinup presentation, the key is an intricate and delicate look. The execution of your piece falls a bit short of that goal.

-You have a lot of smudgy looking areas that could be painted with more finesse. Don't smudge everything to hell--it will smother your painting and suck all the life out of it.

-The decorative parts of the image are too messy and chaotic. Design them more carefully, with actual readable forms instead of a jumbled mess of lots of compound layers. Even if they are meant to be kind of abstract, they should still have a certain level of clarity.

-Expressive doesn't automatically = messy and fast. Economy and speed are not the main factors in expressiveness--that is a common misconception. Expressiveness in brushwork or in general can be very deliberate and painstaking, and not at all the product of speed and economy. You need to make a distinction between the two and know what it is you're really after.

-Areas that are supposed to be clear and detailed, make them so, such as the headdress she's wearing, or the highlights in her hair. You need to have very clear idea of exactly where your focal points are, and the selectively detail your image so the focal points are striking and compelling.

-The neck muscles are too prominent. Tone it down a bit.

-The clavicles don't look convincing. Clavicles are hard, so make sure you have adequate references to check with.

-The nose bridge area looks confused. Check your understanding of the facial structure of a human--the eye-sockets and how they relate to the nose bridge in the bone structure.

-Nostrils are too indistinct. I know you don't want to emphasize the nostrils because it's unattractive to do so, but you can control the attractiveness of the nose by shaping the nostrils just right, instead of altering the value so much that it looks odd (they are two holes with strong ambient occlusion after all--you don't just suddenly alter the laws of physics like that).