Art San pic, please critique

[tachiKC]

[URL=http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/42774506/?&q=by%3Atachikc+in%3Ascraps&qh=sort%3Atime]CLICK HERE[/URL] for the link. The things about it that I might change are the eyes (thier slightly off imo), and I should probably go over the wolf coat again and make the lines cleaner. I will eventually color this in PhotoShop, and amd currently thinking about a brown earthy theme. Please tell me what you think.

Thanks.

[Dodeca]

[SIZE=1]Wow... that's... quite impressive. For a sketch, you managed to get quite a bit of depth and detail into it, and I completely adore the face. Very well done, if you ask me.

Though her right eye [or left, from the drawn perspective] does indeed look a little bit off, as far as I can tell it's only because the line for the lower eyelid isn't quite horizontal, whereas the other eye's is. If you keep the eyelashes where they are, and just redraw the eyelid from that point, it should look alright. I think.

More noticably, however, the neck seems to be a bit too long. I didn't notice it straight away as the darker lines of the face draw the attention away from it, but it if you're going for a fully-coloured masterpiece you may want to shorten it. Really, you could probably just raise the lines for the collar bone to somewhere just below the where the neck meets the fur coat, and it'd a little better. Then there's just the matter of editing the disk ear-rings so that they're about the same size and hang from the same height, and you're done.

Aside from the few little problems with it, bravo. It's an excellent drawing overall, and you should be proud of it. Especially of the face... 'tis wonderful, I say![/SIZE]

[Sara]

[color=#b0000b][size=1]From the way the picture looks, I'm guessing you used references. The best advice I can give you is this: don't.

Let me explain. I honestly have no idea if that shot exists elsewhere (if I had to guess, I'd say no), but different aspects of her costume don't seem to match up, as though you were constantly double checking to make sure that the hat looked [i]that way it was supposed to look[/i], rather than the way it looked best in this picture.

I glanced over some of your other pieces, and right now, it looks like you're copying other works (or to put it another way, it seems that you're trying very hard to make the characters look canon). You don't need to do that. The best fanart [i]isn't[/i] when the characters look exactly the way they do in the movie, it's when the artist has his or her own identifiable style, and his or her own unique take on the characters.

Every almost-canon drawing looks the same. But when you learn to let your own style shine through, people will be able to pick it out. Your commenters will polarise a bit?some will like it a lot, some will dislike it strongly. But in general, a mix of "this is unique and cool" and "this is unique and sucks" opinions is a much better statement on your abilities as an artist than a lot of "this is kind of bland, but I guess it more or less looks like who it's supposed to look like."

Anyway, that's more like "advice for life" than a critique of this drawing, so here's what I see:

Her shoulders are too narrow. If you were to erase what you have there and bring her shoulder out to where the cape is now, the picture would be a lot stronger. (I think that would also help the "her neck looks too long" issue.) Her ear looks like it's backwards. Her earrings are strangely lopsided?they occasionally appear that way in the movie, but because of they angles at which we see them. They should be elongated discs, equal in size and shape. Also, make sure you know where they are supposed to be attached. The way they are drawn right now, they can't be attached in the same way on both sides of her head.

Strong points: Nice detail in the eyes. If you darken the left eye so that it has about the same values as the right, it will look very nice. The lips are very well drawn. I feel like you get a lot of practice drawing faces, so it's something you're used to?this is where your own style peeks through. (Going back to my earlier soapbox, if you want to draw an unfamiliar costume, the best way to make it look natural is to study a reference for a little while, and then draw several dummy sketches with notes to yourself?"the cape attaches here. This many pendants. Hat shaped like this." It's like writing a paper for class?everything needs to be put into your own words (so to speak. In this case, maybe, "your own lines") before it goes into the final project. Otherwise, things will be disjointed.)

All in all, I think you have a lot of talent. Stylistically, my only quibble is that the face paint probably doesn't need its defining lines to be quite that dark. Thematically, you've drawn her older here than she appears in the film. A cool thing to do with that would be to modify her costume somehow to reflect the passage of time. Maybe she wears [i]different[/i] face paint now. Or something like that.

Anyway, keep drawing.[/color][/size]

[tachiKC]

Thanks for the tips guys.

And to be honest, I think that I do that without even thinking about it. I guess in my mind its always been that my art HAS to be the like the way the creators do it or else other people wont like it. I know that that is not the case, but it is hard to let go of that.