Come to Darkness [Gift Art] by RikiyaAkai on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Hello there!

I'm writing for @ProjectComment 's weekly commenting project and would like to give you some constructive feedback on your work!

First of all, this is a very solid character showcase! You put your figure into frame, the pose looks interesting, the perspective is spot-on and you have a nice cel-shaded rendering going on. Right from the start, I knew there wasn't much to be faulted.

but luckily for you, I got a lot to talk about. Just keep in mind that those are only suggestions and I can be wrong in my opinion. But I try to stick to my principles and if you want to see how they look like executed, feel free to browse my gallery for visualization.

Let's start with the background.

The one thing they have to do in context to figure drawing is to make your character stand out from the background. In a way, you are designing backgrounds so they are not noticed.

To achieve that, I keep two rules for backgrounds in figure drawing and they are: contrast and simplified. Let's tackle them one by one:

Contrast is the bigger one of the two. It defines how well we can tell the background apart from the figure. You want to aim for a high contrast and to do that, try to follow these guidelines:

  1. Limit your brightness. You character should have a value range from Black to White while your background should range from Dark grey to light grey, so the darkest darks and lightest lights are reserved for your figure.
  2. Same goes for colour saturation. Use the most saturated colours for your character and dim down the saturation for your background colour(s).
  3. Use complementary colours. This mixes with colour balance a lot. Generally, try to have a limited colour range for your character, this helps you find a complementary for the background. For example: if your character's theme is orange, try blue values for the background and vice versa. Since this character is not your own and you didn't have freedom with the colour palette, I don't criticise it here.
  4. Use sharpness to your advantage. If you blur out your background or use softer strokes like airbrushes and gradients to your figure's sharp lines, this helps letting it stand out even more.

Simplify simply means to keep it simple (who would've guessed). Simply said; your character is the main actor in your showcase. If you put a lot of active lines in your background, it gets confusing as to where the viewer should focus on. You would NEVER want to distract from your main point in your image.

But to not fall into the boring zone of repetitive backgrounds, you are free to use objects or patterns to keep things entertaining as long as they are; you guessed it, simple.

One more thing; I haven't seen them around a lot but in case you want to give your character some background probs like a simple scene to put it into some ambience, that's completely fine as long as you stick to these contrast principles.

Now that the big topic is taken care of, I'd like to quickly address your use of highlights, mainly that they are placed in whatever manner you found fitting. My tip: only use them in one direction, not in every one. This ruins your lighting, which is a crucial part in cel-shading. When you want to show bounced light, keep doing what you did on his shirt for example; just erase the shade from that part. And if you want to go a step further, add another light source in another colour fr a dynamic effect, just try not to over-blow your figure drawing with too many colours.

Lastly, I see some issues here and there, mainly with the folding of his clothes but those are minor complaints in the grand scheme and right now I wouldn't know a better advice than to study in the parts that you feel need some working.

That being said, be reminded that I really like your artwork and would love to know if my feedback had been helpful to you.

Keep it up and enjoy your Sunday!