Trading Cards Series- Inventors/ Scientists

#1

Hi guys,
I am working on a series of trading cards for work about inventors & scientists.

Ill post them as I finis them.
Here is Carver, Tesla and Einstein.

#2

The main problems I see are:

-You have what I call “smudge-a-titus,” where your brushwork is pretty much mostly blurry, smudgy, and without any expressiveness or definition. Try differentiating between surface types, textures, and levels of detail with appropriate/effective brushwork using various brush types and settings.

-Your edges are indiscriminate and confused. There are hierarchies to edges–sharp, firm, soft, and lost. You need to delineate where to use each, either by logic or by artistic license. This includes not just silhouette contours of the object, but every little detail.

-Your use of values tend to be splotchy and overly contrasty. This is a very common problem among beginner/intermediate artists. They seem to feel they have to cram in the entire dynamic range from really light to really dark values everywhere, in everything, all the time. You need to pull back and look at the entire image and plan the tonal composition at the macro level, instead of focusing on each micro area and blasting them with contrasty values.

-Aesthetically speaking, the usage of bright flat colors for background in the context of historical figures in science doesn’t really go well together. The vibe just feels off.

-Your choice of palette for skin tones tend to be unflattering and kind of “icky.” You need to think about skin tone logically. Why are some areas cooler in color temperature and some are warmer? It has to do with how close the bone is to the skin, how much fat there is under the skin, or how much micro blood vessels there are in the area, and it also has to do with direction of lighting (such as back-lit ears and subsurface scattering). How much sun exposure to the area also matters. There’s also lighting. What are your light sources? What color temperature are they? And if you have a full scene of background and props, then radiosity/color bleed is also a factor.

-One thing I tell my students to do, is to do master copies. Take artworks from artists you really admire and do copies as faithfully as you possibly can. This will force you to walk through their shoes a bit, and even if you won’t know exactly what the artist was thinking while he painted this or that, you’ll at least pick up a lot of things you would not have been to develop on your own–especially if you don’t do it mindlessly and actually analyze and think critically as you do them. This is similar to learning how to play instruments and write songs by learning to cover songs of musical artists you really like, or learn their instrument parts note-by-note. It isn’t the only way, but it’s a very helpful one that anyone can benefit greatly from.

#3

Thanks Robert,
for the review. I will work on the pictures more based on your comments.
EDIT
One thing I needed to mention I color my Illustrations by first doing a grey scale versio of the image, then I color.

I can try another pass at coloring the image later.

#4

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