SourCherryJack's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Noir Bear]

Very nice! I love the contrast in this, you're definitely using charcoal in a way that plays to its strengths. The crispness of the edges and the solidity of the fills where its pure black gives it a lot of pop and strengthens the white very nicely; it also goes very nicely with the less solid fills of the lighter shading which adds some texture and gives more weight to the bear.
The background does a very good job of balancing the tones in the picture especially the way it gradates into black on the right side and leads into the deep shadows of the bear's neck. That being said the way the black along the neck leads to the other side all the way across makes it appear as though the top of the bears head is kind of floating, and the hard black silhouetted against the grey is awkward and breaks the flow of the bear's left side, the tones should probably be more consistent along the edge. The left ear's interior could also probably use some greater definition along the ridge of the interior, granted I don't know the exact way the bear looked under the lamp, but I think it would help overall if the edge of the ear were darker to better indicate it.
The last and most important thing I'l say about this is that the picture you've taken could be much better. Right now the way the drawing is angled in the picture is really harming its presentation. You should make sure the drawing is parallel to the lens of the camera, especially when the drawing has rectangular dimensions like this one. It is really off-putting when the edges of the drawing don't line up with the frame of the image window.
Hope this helped in some capacity, great work!

Oink-Moo responds:

Thanks for your detailed comment! :) I totally agree with the framing problem and I'm going to fix that as soon as I can. but I had all this stuff I wanted to update and so I just went for it. My other stuff is framed properly.

And of course I also agree that the shading could be better in some places. Part of why it looks this way was because of the lamp, and also because the project I did this drawing for specifically wanted only 3 values to be used. I'm crazy about blending so I managed to sneak some gradients in there, but I tried not to over-think the piece and sort of just estimated the nearest value to fit it with the three I was using.

Seriously thanks for the critique, I totally appreciate it. :)

[FNAF- Human Bonnie]

I really like the style and color use here. There is a lot of personality in the shapes used and the construction of the characters, which is impressive considering they're just busts. The shading on them is very nice and consistent with light source (I especially like the glow coming from their eyes), however they appear to be shaded using different techniques, the purple one has a very apparent grainy texture, whereas the blue one is much smoother and even has some extra highlights on the hair that indicate a plastic or ceramic surface. Being that the two characters are together the texture difference is a bit jarring. I like the choice of background here, but I think it would be better suited if it were lightly rounded along the edges to better emulate an old tv set. I question whether or not the red outline is necessary, I think they have enough boldness to stand out without it, but its not really negatively effecting the drawing in my opinion. Also on the blue on those little stray hairs at the top would probably cast a light shadow onto her ear, so look out for those little things.
I hope this helps in some capacity, great work, keep it up!

[The Fair Lady]

Awesome work on this. I love the excellent use of not only the monochromatic range, but also the limited value range as well; it does a great job of keeping all of the details very present but not overbearing and largely holds the focal point well with the limited use of red in there.
The sense of depth is also very impressive, as is the sense of motion and life in the background; the way the features are shaded and colored from neutral tones to highlights so sharply mixed with the webs (or strings of goo) gives the environment a lot of life and motion. Balancing those parts with the focal point is a very tight rope you manage to walk incredibly well here.
I will say a small nitpick of this is that when viewed at full size some of the features look a bit shaky particular in the top corners on the highlights, but those disappear if viewed at a slightly smaller than full size. The red on the, what looks like an eye above the girl pulls the attention away fro her in the sword and disrupts the natural flow the rest of the drawing is working to create from the edges of the painting down to the sword in the ground (or vise versa). Perhaps recoloring it, moving it lower, or adding more would help to fix that. Also this is purely my view, but I think the shine coming from the sword would be better at full white to really bring it out, I get that it would disrupt the palette range, but it would definitely bring it out more.
This is an excellent painting and it does so much so well, great work, man. Looking forward to more!

HeartlessArts responds:

WOW thanks for the super in depth review, i dont even know what monochromatic means lol, yea i guess you're right the red does pull the attention away but i did want to keep the red true to the original NPC all the red parts including the sword are red in the original and i thought it would be nice if i made her red parts stand out :3 thank you so much :D <3

[Hotline miami]

I like the idea you have here, it's a good start for sure. The placement of the two characters sets the drawing up for a strong and interesting composition. However your coloring style, color choice and lighting really bring it down. To start you need to sharpen up your shading a lot, right now its very soft all around; and it looks like you use straight white to get lighter tints in there as opposed to using lighter tints of the color, this gives you a sort of plastic-y look in a lot of places, particularly the jacket. Right now the brown of the other room and the brown of his jacket are kind of making the drawing too brown, you should change the floor's color; from what I understand Hotline Miami has really bold colors, you should take advantage of that and really use some stronger, bolder and more vibrant colors, the floors could use it a lot. Look up the time period and place, I'm not an expert but 1980's Miami interior design were not really into brown and pale pink as colors, from my understanding the went more on the ivory and marble floor type things, shiny and lighter. Your highlights are too much, the huge white splotches on the floor and the walls should be gotten rid of entirely, they kind of look like clouds and attract too much attention, I understand that you're going for the muzzle flare's lighting and that's a good read, but the light on the walls would be much dimmer for one and be much more evenly distributed as opposed to super focused on those spots.
You should do some perspective studies around your house to get a feel for how walls and floors line up and how to better keep it consistent, right now you've done a decent job, but walls in a building are generally all comprised of right angles and the divide between the two rooms and the far wall aren't lined up as well as they could be.
Also that box looks like it is floating, doing some basic object still lives can really help with getting objects to line up with a base, I strongly recommend doing some. The 7,500 above the chicken guys head is a bit out of place in that black box, if you removed the black box and made it bigger I think it would stand out and fit much better.
I hope this helps in some capacity, keep up the good work!

IceBreak23 responds:

too long, but yeah to make an background is not that easy it takes alot of time to make, i'm just tyring my best.

[Kaiba at FNAF]

You have a pretty strong and dramatic composition going here, but there are a few nagging issues with this drawing that are holding it back. The most glaring of them is that you didn't draw everything yourself, I get that its a fanart mash up thing, but the background and especially the fire should be drawn by you. Not only is it just a better thing to have drawn it all yourself for the experience of it, but also it would make everything look much more cohesive; right now you have a cartoony anime thing going on in the foreground, a realistic fire and then another cartoon together in the middleground and you have a 3D rendered desk in the background. The mixing of styles like that could work in some circumstances, but I think it would just be an overall stronger piece if you did the background yourself.
Past that that as stated I really like the composition here. You get a nice sort of implied strong diagonal line from the security guard to the robot behind him which gives it a dynamic feel. The coloring and lighting is also well done on the guard and and really sells the depth, I think you could have toned down the highlights to better match the fire. Fire is a tricky light source to work with and given the color and dispersion of the fire you used to I would say to dim your highlights just a bit to better match the fire's color, or brighten the color of the fired, the robot in the back even for being simpler is shaded very well. To get even more technical into the composition I think moving that one pillar of fire that comes from under the robot's hand and goes up through it down and to the right a bit and then heighten the opacity a bit so that it isn't "breaking up" the two characters and instead framing the space leading to them would better help to define and guide the viewers from the guard to the robot. Also widen that lamp a bit, lower it and move it left, maybe offset it so that its diagonal tilted with the upward side to the right and it will also help bring out the composition.
Hope this helps in some capacity, There's a lot of promise in this drawing, the shading especially, keep up the good work.

[Witchsona]

I like the how clean and crisp the is, the line work and shading are very nice an consistent and go quite well together. While I don't really care much for the design philosophy of this kind of character is it is unarguably largely well executed. Her legs not being there for me is a misstep, but the manner in which you have omitted them is much better than simply having them run off of the page so good work with that. The light blue glow of the threads do a great job of offsetting the mostly muted earthy tones of both her cloths and skin, as well a create a nice direct line to guide the eye and strengthen the overall composition (which in admittedly would be much harder to pull off if you had included the legs). There are a few issues with the color fills going outside of the linework, most notably the hand on the right. The biggest issue I have with this character design is with her belt, the band on her hat her gloves and the line across her skirt and by extension I suppose all of the cosmetic stitching on her jacket as well. Right now you have two different, white-ish colors going on, for the sake of continuity in her color scheme they would definitely do better as the same color as opposed to the two. Its really nitpicky, but considering the large focus on just the character it stands out much more. Also another strange thing is the lightning bolt on her hat and the bolt earring she's wearing. I don't know your character, but she definitely has a sewing thing going on what with the thread, the dolls, and the stitching on herself, I would think, again, for the sake of character design continuity instead of a lightning bolt she should have a thimble, or a spool, or a pincushion or a bobbin or some other sewing related item, the lightning bolt is kind of random. Same goes for the bolt earring.
Either way it's a very well drawn design with excellent shading and a lot of personality. I don't personally care too much for the actual design so that brings it down a bit for me. Hope this helps in some capacity excellent work!

justZaz responds:

holy crap, kudos just for taking the time to write this, but many thanks for doing so.
admittedly i got lazy in some parts (the different white-ish colors for instance i just kinda did because i had some swatches lying around and just sort of picked at them haphazardly). the bolt and lightning thing do have something to do with her actual character though (this is just a costume design i suppose - not canon, as it were).

im still learning, but stuff like what you wrote could only help me get better, so thanks again!

[Self Portrait]

Looks great man. You've got some excellent contrast coming through on this and really great, crisp shading. I especially like the way you've changed up shading techniques and color use between the face and the hands, it adds some really good dimension as well as shows an understanding of the differences between skin and the way light interacts with skin on different parts of the body. That being said you could definitely refine that hand a bit more, right now its largely featureless, especially in the middle, and lose its form a bit as it meets the cuff of the jacket, it stands out much more because of how close it is to the detail on the face. The jacket is also very well realized - and more than just being very well shaded with the folds - it gives a great amount of dark/light contrast with the hand and face which also works great with the gradation on the red background.
The biggest issue with this drawing though is one that I didn't even notice until the end of this review: you made the image to large. When viewed in full size there are definitely very noticeable cracks in the armor, you lose a bit of the crispness of the jackets edge against the red, some of the highlights lose a bit of there umph (super technical term there) but that can be fixed by just re-sizing the dimensions and uploading that in place of this one. Choosing the right size, or distance to view art from is a huge part of the process that is often overlooked, especially with digital. Case in point here, it does a disservice to have the larger size available.
Even so, awesome job on this, hope this helped in some capacity, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more from you.

ScaredyDave responds:

Very great advice! I often forget to resize the image to one that makes the cracks go away. I usually work in too large a file size and forget to look at it in full size when its all complete! Thanks so much for the very informative critique! I will implement these suggestions soon! (I can at least do the size tonight though!)

[Taokaka]

Right off the bat there are a lot of issues going on in here. Most notably is your shading, there is really no consistency to the way it is done, it seems you have a general idea for the base layer where the light source is (top right) but then you have these highlights placed randomly on all parts of the character that completely disagree with that. The highlights should only occur on the parts where the light is directly hitting and generally they'd contour with a certain area or are on an edge so the light would really be focused. The best way to wrap your head around that concept is doing still lives of various household objects under a single, strong light source.
Also problematic with your shading technique is that it is very limited and honestly quite boring. You currently really only have a standard color and then a slight shade of that color on any given area. you should try using multiple shades and tints to get better depth in your character as well as bring out the contrast a bit more. The character outline is largely unnecessary, but if you're going to keep it it should probably match the yellow bars going across the bottom or be different color, right now as is they're too close.
The way the legs get cut off is jarring and takes away from the drawing as a whole, you should really consider reformatting your composition to fit them on there. Back to the shading, I feel like its way too soft as well and combined with the outlines it makes for an unappealing effect. I would say either go full cartoon with sharp, crisp cellshading and keep the lines; or go full on render with a very well developed dark, to medium-dark, to medium... to light, and ditch the outlines.
On the character itself right now she is very much in the same color family throughout. She's all yellow, brown, tan and orange, the white, the red and the black are nice in that the break it up a bit, but more of that is definitely needed. Try experimenting with complementary colors as accents like jewelry or clothing patterns, they'll bring a lot of nice contrast out and make drawings much more visually striking. I get that this is fanart, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it your own.
That "nyaa" written there in a very basic font could also go, if you're going to include lettering in a drawing, really go all out, make the words feel necessary to the drawing, give them personality to accentuate the characters, using canned fonts, especially soulless canned fonts like that don't give any real insights into the character and just serve to distract from the focus.
Finally your signature/watermark thing is a bit too big, complicated and intrusive, for future pieces try streamlining that, make it smaller less busy and probably a bit more transparent. Make it a single color as well, the blueish fill with the white outlines draw way too much attention to it, better to just stick with white.
Hope that helped in some capacity, you have a lot of promise, definitely keep up the good work!

[Guile as an action figure!!]

I like the way you shaded this, it really sells the action figure vibe. The left arm and hand look to be considerably larger and longer than the right though, that should be flipped because the right is closer to us. the white outline around the character is a good way to make a character without a background pop however the splat marks in the background are the same color as the outline so it just looks really busy and distracts from the character. You should either get rid of them entirely since the character design looks to be strong enough to stand on his own, or dull the color of the splats; maybe a darker olive shade to match with the character.
Good work, hope that helped in some capacity.