character battle - Uber boy vs Skulldor the Eviltastic

#1

Hey, this is another personal piece with some characters i doodled up. The bad guys extremely cheesey but that was intentional. I like to think of uber boy of a mini hulk with magical powers. I’ve a narrative to add to the characters but i think i’ll redesign the skulldor and make him more unique before i go near that so in the mean time this is just for fun.

My main difficulty i’ve discovered is generally perspective and getting the characters to connect with the scene in a believable yet dramatic way. I still have a lot of colouring and rendering to do but I was wondering if anybody had any feedback before i did more. Thanks :drool:



#2

While the premise is meant to be wacky and fun, I’m not sure if you meant for the color palette to be kind of loud and slightly garish as well–maybe that’s part of the cheesiness you were after?

Compositionally, this is quite static for an action scene. You have the camera pointing straight at the characters, at normal eye-level, and at a normal focal length–forming a vanilla and common point of view that has no excitement. Try changing the camera angle (and yes, this means completely re-doing the whole thing. Often that’s what it takes to improve something). Try lowering the camera so it’s a worm’s eye view, tilting up at an angle, and then try tilting the horizon as well so there’s a dynamic sense of movement.

In terms of lighting, it’s also kind of diffused and bland. There’s no indication of what kind of light sources are in this scene, the direction of the lighting, interesting play of form and cast shadows, and so on. You need to determine exactly what your lighting scheme is, which light sources are in this scene, what their color temperatures are, and what’s the ratio of illumination between them.

#3

Had to take a break from this for a while due to other work but ive made a bit more progress.

Thanks for the crit, you helped with a lot of areas I was struggling with. With regards the overall composition I realised I was much more focused on designing the characters as opposed to considering the overall arrangement so I really need to approach my work differently or in different stages.

I’ll admit I went a bit crazy with some of the colour and I wasnt considering overall lighting enough, i was much more focused on rendering individual areas. I went with some hard shadows which definitely give a little bit more life to the scene but I really struggled with lighting the background and I didn’t want to just abandon the piece as I have a tendency to do sometimes. So I took some artistic licence with it and softened the levels and tried to make it very much secondary to the characters. Im not really sure if it works though. I still a bit to do with terms of making some of the magic pop and glow in the painting but I think its almost as good as I can get it considering the circumstances. So I’ll finish it later and consider it a learning exercise :slight_smile:

THANKS!

#4

finished it off. definitely found it a worthwhile exercise despite the setbacks. THANKS

#5

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