SourCherryJack's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[El Goli]

There is a lot of good in the character drawing and the color choices there, but I feel like this piece is fighting with itself. The background is doing a lot to muddy what we're looking at. The diagonal angle of the the bars creates a lot of visual action, which isn't a problem, but the way that the character's arm are following the direction of the bars makes it look to be lost in the direction. Adding to the problem is that between the background and the character the values are very much in the same area so there isn't enough contrast to push the character forward and the background backward.
I would recommend darken the tones for the background or the shadows on the character more to create more contrast. Or going for a background that doesn't have such stark lines, that way the graphic shading on the character can be pushed out more against the background.

On another note, I really like the way you did the linework, the bit of transparency in spots really does a lot to add character and interest without sacrificing the boldness of a black outline.

lilm00nie responds:

thanks for your input!

[Uravity Kick!]

I think that this one might be a stronger piece without the KO.
The more subtle warmth of the colors you're using with the character do enough to contrast against the background while the teal piping on the shirt grounds and unifies the character to the background very nicely creating a sense of cohesion in the piece. I feel like the KO is too saturated and draws too much attention to itself by breaking the values and color palette the girl establishes with the background. I also don't know how successful it is in going with the visual flow and keeping the eye moving smoothly - right now the legs and the outstretched arm serve to pull the viewer in to the girl's core and up to her face, but while traveling up the arm we hit the KO which is a bit of a detour without much to see.
Something to consider, really great linework, colors and textures here!

coolanice responds:

I was sat there for a good 10 minutes thinking if I should leave it out as well haha. Without it there's a fair amount of blank space, but I agree it does seem to skew the focal point of the image, so I'll keep that in mind for future pieces for sure. Great feedback man, really appreciate it!

[Honey Bear - Kaijune]

Right off the bat it is very grabbing, good color use and easy to read. The red and the green and the tints and shades of each work well together and against each other create a visually appealing image. Sticking to three solid variants per color keeps things crisp while also providing enough depth for the monster to be believable. The shaky linework does a lot to keep the organic feel of fur without going over the top too much so good work on that, I think maybe a few points it could be crisper like on his left elbow and the top part of his hump, but the positive effect achieved outweighs the small nitpick there. I rally like the little marks on his body, the odd line and pip here and there really help keeping your monster from becoming plasticky
I'm not too big on the title. The green bar feels too saturated and the lettering could be a bit beefier (great work on the stylized title though - very creatively solved). I think a good work around would be scaling up the lettering and making the lines thicker but having the green be a drop shadow so the black is more subtly highlighted by bits of green rather than "hi-liter'd) by it.
The stylization of the clouds could be improved by making them crisper - I think - to match the bear and the city. ALTERNATIVELY you can harken back to older sort of collage style trashy pulp zine styles and have the background skyline and city be more detailed and rendered out (or just use clippings with a black-and-white filter) and have your monster crushing them; it would drastically alter what your drawing is about in terms of type of art but it's something to consider for future drawings.
I'm going back and fourth on whether I like the foreground buildings being blacked out or not, but they should be bigger. the far background buildings are well-colored and show an appropriate amount of distance but the foreground ones are smaller than the background ones, which while not impossible does create issues with the scale. A fun thing to try and do would be puts some buildings way closer to the viewer along the sides to sort of frame the monster and the whole piece. Buildings are great for frames because they do not need to be the same size or distance, they can in this case be partially destroyed and most of all in a head on shot like this the lines of windows when drawn in perspective create a grid and directional lines leading straight to your subject - helping with the flow and composition of the piece as a whole (though I will say you'd need to zoom out a bit to effectively use that space.
Moving a bit further along with the buildings I would say since the monster is standing right in the middle of the city there should be some knocked over buildings, some smoke rising up and maybe some fires on the buildings possibly helicopters or planes on the horizon or around the monster. Also side note the size of this is a bit on the large size, scaling down the picture is usually a good idea for hiding any imperfections - when zoomed in a noticed your buildings definitely lose some crispness that I had liked about them in general unless soething is super intricate and detailed the largest side of your canvas when uploaded to the portal never has to exceed something 2000 pixels.
Overall good job on this one, there's a lot to like for sure, it's a well executed type of simplicity that is crisp and fun, rather than basic and boring. The monster is well drawn and has a really solid color choice that is pushed forward by the washed out colors of the background. While there are some issues with the drawing, like the scale of the buildings and the basic foreground; and some parts of the story side could be more fleshed out with regard to destruction of the city, the issues don't hurt the piece as a whole too much.

Imrie responds:

Wow!
Thanks so much for taking the time to review my art.....really appreciate it.
Totally agree with the city and clouds (i have recently posted more kaijune artwork that tries to remedy some of this)
Love the buildings framing the whole scene idea, will be messing about with this.

Again thanks for your feedback and time ill be putting it to good use!

[Multis]

Dude, this is fuckin' killer.

TTRASHH responds:

Oh hai thx uu

[outerspace]

There are a lot of standard issues with this, mostly in the anatomy and her right hand in particular but really the only advice on that is to do studies, break it down into basic shapes etc etc. But what is really standing out to me on this is the color palette. Overall you have it going pretty well with the alien girl, the yellows, greens, blues and violets work really well on her as does he planet she's standing on. The washed out colors of the planet do a great job of pushing her much more saturated colors forward in the composition great work on that. The black void of the space behind her could be improved by being a more navy blue or having bits of it be navy blue fading into black. Black is a very powerful tool, but in a scene like this I feel like it might suck the life out of it a bit too much given the nature of the shading and coloring of everything else.
The shade of yellow/orange of the planet she is holding isn't meshing well with cooler tones of her body. I like the warmness of it, but I think if it were more the colors of Jupiter (oranges reds tans in particular) it might work better, maintaining the warmness but also not being related through color similarity to the yellow stars on her tits but not fully committed since its a duller more ochre shade of yellow than the vibrant stars. The yellow glow also could be tweaked a bit, I think the soft shading isn't the way to go, it stands out on the hair particularly, but I find more solid thinner bolder strokes placed well works a lot better by generating more intense contrasts in the image.
The final and biggest issue I have with this is are the asteroids in the background. The brown doesn't work at all and completely breaks the otherwise solid color palette of the drawing as a whole. A quick fix would be to make them a similar color to the planet at the bottom but lighter. This will push them into the background more and not draw attention to them while pushing the character forward more in the composition as well as break up the background.
Good job overall though, colors are tempting to go crazy with but stepping out of what you think or assume colors are allows for much more interesting and even more convincing illustrations at times.

Amberscribbles responds:

Thanks so much! I love this critique!! very helpful advice. This is very out of the box and new territory for me so I'm thankful you've pointed out things to improve on.

[Merm]

Really great colors and composition going on here, though I think it could benefit from a bit more crispness in some of the rendering. The ear and hair stand out the most to me as areas that can use a bit more time. Also the area where the head meets the neck is also looking a bit too graphic with the hard edge separating them rather than more gradual shading. But great job, overall a very well put together piece.

GhoulKitten responds:

Thank you for taking time to type a review! I could spend more time on it, that's true but I wanted to move on.
Yeah, I wanted the attention to go to her face, so I didn't render other things as much as her. That's why it's so crispy. That goes for the hair as well. It's more detailed near her face to draw attention.

[F*CK]

I really like this design. I think its fairly well put together some of the edges and points where lines meet should be cleaned up a bitand there are some serious aliasing issues all around, but I still really enjoy the design and sharpness of the colors and fills as well as the forms displayed and can get past those previously mentioned issues.
What I can't get past is that big, fat, ugly-ass watermark over the whole thing. Putting your signature/web address on work is cool and great, but when done like this it really really really ruins a piece. Especially because its a graphic with limited colors and very simple. Fix that and this could be so much better.

akosta3201 responds:

ok thanks

[Monster(4)]

Really cool concept and design on this one, with more time taken for refinement I'd say you're on to something great. The spines get a bit loose and the grey tone along the mid thigh, and top of the lower back could use some shading, right now that solid plane suggests flatness when the area is very rounded. Also try tweaking the foot placement, as it right now they don't look grounded. The back foot Reaches lower on the page (read:closer to us) than the front one which is responsible for the grounding issue. Also the blacked out feet could be rendered, but if you did a refined version I'm sure that would come.
Also this part is just a personal suggestion, I'd lose the tusks, there's enough going on in the design that I think it won't feel like it's missing anything without them. Something to consider maybe, maybe not. Anyway cool design, I'd like to see it fully realized good job either way.

GhoulKitten responds:

Thanks for the review! I actually like this one a bit, so I will probably do a more refined version of it. I'll take what you said into consideration when I'm working on it, thanks again!

[Zim]

Pretty solid drawing here, great emotion in the eyes and face, the body could have a more dramatic line of action though and angling the head up more would benefit selling the pain he's feeling being zapped. Expanding on the line of action: right now it is very vertical when you break it down to the single line, shoot for diagonal lines - the more extreme the better. Vertical and horizontal are resting positions so they are very boring; even simply rotating zim clockwise a couple degrees will make the pose feel much more dynamic and intense.
This is pretty well rendered with a nice pallet on all the respective parts of zim, but they aren't doing much to sell him being zapped. The lightning is encompassing him so the highlights would surround him on all sides and get darker when going ink inward (when e look at it from the 2D plane anyway). I think your highlights could be more intense and maybe tinged blue on Zim instead of yellow. All in all I do like the colors you've chosen, they just don't agree so we'll with the lighting.
Last point and this is huge. If you walk away from this review with nothing else take this with you: that background style has never and will never work. You're better off just leaving the background white than duplicating the image you drew and making it bigger, offset and transparent. Doing that looks and is lazy and anybody with a developed sense of design and art will not like it. A better way to do that old be to take the silhouettes and make them a singly complimentary color and make it seem like a shadow or something, experiment with it.

mannyzworld responds:

WOW!!!! Thanks for all the pointers, I really appreciate you taking the time to give me some feed back!!!!

I agree with you a hundred percent, on the lines, its something that i need to work on. I also need to break out of the realistic mentality. What i mean by this is that i used to love taking a more realistic approach to drawing but became a bit bored with it since i get enough of that in real life :]. I enjoy a cartoon approach because you can break away nd do essentially anything [at least that's what i think]. However i am still struggling to be able to push those boundaries but still have the piece make since.

I struggled with the lightning because i didn't want to take away from the color, i didn't just want to put a blue solid color and then bring down the opacity because it looked like the brightness of the color went away. But i like your in put some bright blue highlights would have sold it and not taken away from the colors.

I will look into the silhouettes idea as well.

Again thanks for the input its much appreciated!!!

[Ratcatcher of Hameln]

Dieser bilder sind ganz toll! Aber meiner Meinung nach, das du brauchst nur die linken teil mit Wörter und Bild.
Okay fun experiment trying (and probably failing) to remember how to use German, but yeah I think you only need the left portion, the image is and composition gain so much from having the silhouetted mice/rats walking from the buildings. Plus we don't see any page layouts in the art portal so it stands out as especially great. The way it is now with the blank space in the left corner is hurting the composition a lot, but the drawing and concept is so great I can't give it anything but a five!

JulianJoelMessar responds:

Hey thank you for your great feedback...ps your german is not so bad I untersandt what do mean:D