SourCherryJack's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Interfate Hourglass]

I really like what's going on in the composition here, the way the spirals of the chains and green energy work together to create depth and lead to the hourglass is fantastic. The details of the hourglass holder is also phenomenal the stark black against the red with the yellow/gold highlights really pushes it forward even against the bright and plentiful green immediately behind it.
I think the green could stand to be desaturated a bit as you get further into the background to add a bit more dimension and accentuate the depth a bit more. Also the way the bubbles are largely consistent sizes breaks the depth a bit, so maybe making some of them smaller would help keep the depth in check. The biggest issue I see with this though is the title is in major competition with the hour glass for the focal point. The title right now is so saturated and the fact that its such a bright color brings it out more so it sort of becomes a disruption in the nice spiral you have going on because of the way it seems to jut out in the upper left area of the composition. I think short of making the type smaller you could try desaturating the yellow and/or making it gradate into a color other than white would send it back a bit and make it gel better overall with the composition as a whole.
Excellent work on this, I hope this helps in some capacity keep up the great work.

HeartlessArts responds:

thats a pretty spot on critique thanks a lot men ill deffinately keep this in my mind next time :)

[Tokyo Times]

There are some very strong points in this drawing, but in general there are a lot of things holding it back from its full potential as a drawing. Luckily quite a few of these issues are relatively easy to fix and/or rework. Right off the bat you have some good color choices and everything used works well together and communicates a very desolate feel. Those rocks and the floor in the foreground and mid-ground are very well drawn and rendered and the sky background is very interesting in the large clearly defined strokes used to make it; it keeps the grey interesting and makes the sky feel more alive as opposed to solid colors or a smooth gradient. The vagueness of the sky should be carried over more to the buildings in the background, right now as they are with the hard outlines make them way too clear and defined; just by removing those lines you will go a long way in pushing them back and adding to the sense of distance in your drawing, you can further the sense of distance by washing out the colors a bit more. The buildings further in the back are in a good place right now, but I would recommend throwing in a few more and have them run off the page to the left and right to give a better sense of continuity and scale for the city.
The characters up front have a lot of problems, they're costumes are well shaded and drawn, but their poses, proportions and placement are a bit awkward. The crouching girl right now needs some work on her body structure, the way her legs are don't look to line up with her waist properly and the knee on the left needs to be made larger and come out more to better capture the foreshortening effect. the girl on the left's anatomy could use some work as well, women's hips are generally drawn an equal width to their shoulders to communicate femininity. The fabric of her robe could be drawn a bit more organically, right now its very up and down and rigid looking. She's also very symmetrical which is pretty boring and sucks the life out of her; try making some adjustments to her pose to better compliment the crouching girl. The crouching girl is looking off to the right somewhat bewildered, try playing that up and have the robed girl reacting to that as well, things like that add to the narrative of a drawing.
I hope this helps in some capacity, keep up the good work.

Smoxul responds:

Thank you, immensely, for the critique and comments. I'm only just starting to really draw backgrounds onto things so advice on that is very helpful. More dynamic compositions are something I'm trying to force myself to do although for original pieces I often get caught up on general design which forces me down to a bland straight forward position. I guess I just have to be more bold and brave with that kinda thing.
Thanks again!

[My chillout zone]

Awesome work on this, man. Great use of color and amazing sense of depth and distance. The colors are perfect; the way you desaturate the blue with orange as oppose to grey to get that fade out effect is beautiful and provides a great sense of harmony with the orange glow of the sky, which in turn brings it back with the smooth transition back to blue. The shapes you use here for the trees are very interesting and pull it out of reality a bit which is great and compliments the shapes of the city off in the distance. The trees also do a wonderful job in framing the picture and focusing attention slightly to the left giving the sort of effect that we are looking in the same direction as the dude on the bench. Back to the sky, those clouds are great in the way that they are not overpowering, and very lightly done, they're the perfect opacity and thickness to just break up the sky and communicate the difference between ground and sky without drawing any attention to themselves and overpowering or distracting the other more interesting areas of the piece.
However the guy on the bench probably could be depicted a bit better, while his placement is great since the silhouette breaks up the image and provides guidance to the city, I think right now under close scrutiny his body seems to be too thin at the waist area and the way he's so close to the bench's support plank, it appears he has three arms; also his left leg looks very thick compared to his right one.
The moon's placement could probably be better as well, it could be just me, but right now the way it appears to be in the horizontal middle really pulls my eye too it as I go across the image which I feel shouldn't be the case as the skyline of the city is so much more interesting. I think it could benefit from being made lighter, being made closer to the orange of the sky, being moved to the left - any combination of the preceding or even being omitted entirely.
But those are small gripes, fantastic job on this.

zer0hawk9339 responds:

Wow! Thank you so much for that constructive review. I agree with everything you said. The picture has its good sides and its bad sides. I could've done it better and more detailed i agree. The moon is kinda weird and out of place, but i didn't really feel like making a better one. And about the guy, well with mouse I felt kinda weird to draw body and just left it as it got. Thank you again for that comment, i noted some stuff and the next thing i post will be better for the sake of good landscapes!

[Galaxy]

You have an interesting concept here, but there are a few things that can be done to strengthen your composition and give the piece a stronger overall tone and mood. Right now the objects in the composition are competing for attention in an unflattering way, the colors of the background are very vibrant and have a generally nice look in the coloring, especially against the black of the stars but their positioning in relation to each other is making it so none of them are working in harmony. The shapes the trails take should be reworked so that they guide the eye to a focal point and the colors should work together to push the eye along that one "trail;" right now from the bottom to the top you have blue to orange/red/yellow branching to green and almost leading to magenta; those colors have no logical flow with the possible exception of red to magenta, but its more on the orange side so this leads to a color imbalance of sorts. The way the green branches off of the red and leads to nothing really throws off the flow and because its a lot like the red one in terms of shape you have this effect that makes the center feel much busier while making the top left feel more empty and throwing off the balance of the background.
The issue is exacerbated by the actual intended focal point of the woman sitting cross legged in the rectangle. Straight up ditch the rectangle and make the girl blend in more to the space, right now the way the rectangle is colored breaks up the composition more and further scrambles the focal point. Use those colors to your advantage, right now you've got a mostly cool palette going on back there with the blue green and magenta so in I'd say play that aspect up some more; get rid of the red one and make the figure of the woman red/yellow/orange with white highlights, then have the colors arranged in a way that leads to it in order from least intense to most intense color. With the woman being more connected to the background than she currently is you'll have a much more unified drawing as well as add greater to an idea of unity or connection with the universe than what the rectangle is providing.
You'll definitely want to study up on some composition rules and guidelines, like the golden spiral/section/ratio and balance for further information on how to better compose the image you can check out the composition tutorials on the art101 page here at Newgrounds.
Good work, hope this helps in some capacity!

sylvrn responds:

Thanks for the review! This really helps me with some of the problems I encountered while drawing this. I really didn't know where I was going with this. It was a bit of an experiment, I guess. I will definitely take your advice, thank you!

[andras]

I really like the muted colors in this. The consistently desaturated hues give a really nice sense of unity to the drawing while the colors themselves, especially the yellows of his feet, hands, crown, and beak, break up the blue/blue-green majority and keep the focus on the bird dude. The texture used does a good job of keeping the sky area from feeling empty despite not much going on up there and definitely compliments the content and mood of the drawing.
Your composition work is fantastic on this, the sword leads into the figure which flows very well down into the little creatures leading all the way to the background and the obelisk-like protrusions. Its all very fluid and gets all the information of the drawing across, as well as communicating the depth of the drawing. I think idea of the vastness of the plane would be helped if instead of the obelisks just straight up stopping there were some outlined in the distance that began to take on the colors of the fog/background more. Also on a much smaller note, I don't know if the little creatures coming from off the bottom looks as good as if they were coming from the side left side or bottom left corner exclusively; the way the two partially shown ones are coming in from the bottom mid-right edge kind of messes with the composition a bit and is inconsistent with the later established mostly two by two line of the creatures further into the drawing. Just something to consider taking a look at in the future, its not a huge issue.
Awesome job on this.

pitzwig responds:

thank u so much this was such a pleasure to read

[Mother]

Awesome work on this. I really love the figure and the colors used. The shading on the mother contrasts nicely with the bolder solid tones of the background and that gold; and man, the use of the metallic gold there is awesome and really adds a ton of punch to the drawing, I imagine it looks even better in person.
The stripes in the background do a great job at accentuating the figure and the bolder red keeps the largely empty space to the left from feeling empty and wasted while also pushing attention further to the right (to the figure) while the gold sliver to the left keeps us from going off of the page, excellent work on that.
While I personally really like the proportions you have going on here with the elongated arms, and such I think it would better suit the theme of "Mother" if you were to accentuate more traditionally motherly parts, hips and bust are generally what I can think of, though some props would bring it out more, but that could definitely clash with the composition of the piece so it's a hard point to argue, and the piece overall does fine without - just something to think about in the future.
Also last point on this is one of the pitfalls of doing traditional work, the image here brings the drawing down. The lighting could be stronger and more uniform, you may have to move some lamps around to get the desired lighting, you may want to do some light tampering with the brightness, values and contrast in a basic photo editor to get it to look closer to how it would under ideal lighting conditions. Also cropping the image a bit to cut out the excess where we go off the page will greatly help the focus. Those issues don't destroy this drawing, but if they are fixed fairly easily since they don't deal with the drawing itself.
Hope this helps in some capacity. Awesome work, I definitely look forward to more.

Carchcommand responds:

Wow thanks for the awesome response! I totally see what you mean about making the proportions more "Motherly", I 'll totally use that advice if I ever do another female type of these things! The lighting was something I just couldn't get right for some reason! With the conditions I had I tried to make the best of it though. I only had one small IKEA desk lamp available, and I had to try to figure out which areas of the picture I wanted to focus that on. I wanted the colors to be true to their natural state, but I also wanted the viewer to see the shimmer of the gold D; I would have totally scanned it but my scanner is broken, and I don't feel like taking the painting to Walgreens to have that done. Anyways, thanks for your comment! It was refreshing and beneficial to read, and I look forward to reading any advice/criticism you have about my art in the future! :D

[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. :)

[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