Continuing to experiment with my new style which I am finding to be very fun to play with. This is a flying jackalope for the jimbobdrawingshow.

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@larry-whitler said in Mushroom village- critique please:

Very creative and original! I love the playfulness of your work. A child (and parent) would be enchanted turning the pages of a book illustrated by you. Love it!

Thanks!! I have fun creating it this way, so I’m glad it shows through the work. I do need to find a way to use this technique in a quicker fashion, so I’m planning on experimenting how to do that these next few weeks.

@lauraa cool, sorry I can't help with the software issues, I use a Wacom and when things get Wonky , things start flying around, I trash the app and reinstall . Chris

@sarah-luann Yes, that is perfect. I think, especially in illustrations, that there is an interesting way to approach this that you have demonstrated which is to use outlines some of the time but not all of the time. Great work, by the way.

@heather-boyd B,C, and G were very difficult to decide haha.

@cjones You're not really doing anything wrong. The thing is that screens have a backlight, so everything is brighter because there is literally light shining through even the darkest areas. Ink on paper does not have the same benefit. You'll probably need to have a file with adjustments you'll use solely for printing. It'll look terrible on screen, but will produce a more accurate image when printed.

Many years ago I wrote a song about a dolphin and a girl. My partner and I recorded the song and then wrote a story for a children's radio show we used to do. The story is called "Aegir and Melina" (Aegir is the dolphin, Melina is the girl.)

Now, as we get older, we have decided to take that song and story and re-write it so that it works as a children's picture book. Anyway, here are the first two illustrations for the book. 0_1528229835517_40563753104_d8fd588cf0_z.jpg 0_1528229815694_40506437194_5ec044f5c3_z.jpg

@tessaw thanks for the feedback, its good hear its working. I do enjoy working this way and will continue with my mushroom piece for this months contest.

@miriam Thank you so much! I'll check out the video. Thanks for the perspective advice! I like the idea of adding more destruction, too. I agree that a killer robot would probably cause more damage. My husband also informed me that this particular robot has lasers in both arms, so that's something else I think I'll be playing around with to maybe add some diagonal lines.

@gary-wilkinson Thanks fore the complement and for the feedback (I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I’d get with this group). What a cool idea you suggested. Do you think it would help with my storytelling? A good deal of my work is about life from death ( i.e. rebirth, circle of life). So I was thinking of adding a sequence of images of the animal gradually decomposing and being replaced by more plants.

@heather-boyd Thank you for your critique!

@sheri_p79 That's much better! It was a very subtle thing but you've managed well I think.

@andyg Congrats! This looks really really amazing! The fur texture looks great and the lighting fits the mood perfectly! You must have worked really hard on this. The only thing that stood out to me is the right arm of the giraffe holding the mic. It looks much shorter than it should be. And may I suggest having the giraffe open its mouth at the mic (like talking or singing) might make it look more like he's in action instead of posing for a picture. Thank you for sharing! It's beautiful!

@miriam It is a brush with spokes like a bike wheel, you don't change the angle you just move it in and out around the picture until it lines up with your sketch by using the move tool and scaling up and down. I start by making a frame the shape of my picture plain and then I can place my points outside that frame. I you want the brush I can email it to you but it is easy to make 0_1527878262662_Untitled-1.jpg

@jon-anderson Thank you!

day 3- some kinda vicious gobliny warpick.

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@flordevitaz Congratulations! You did a great job of keeping your characters and design consistent throughout the series.

Here with some raking light coming through. Not quite the whole cast shadow pattern suggested by @Kevin-Longueil as, while awesome, it's a bit of a stretch in terms of cheating with the light...!
What do you think? Final?

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@rachy Your thumbnails look really humorous. I know that eager feeling of wanting to jump right to painting, but you're doing it a better way, with lots of planning on the front end, to save time and fixes on the back end.

The way you've organized your thumbnails, though, would benefit from a traditional storyboard structure. Here's an example of one I've used (that Lee White might have shared in one of the SVSLearn tutorials):
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By using this structure, you'll be thinking of each spread layout, and noticing the pacing and progression more. This book dummy layout is for the standard 32 page book, but other standard lengths are 16, 24, and 48 pages, so you can modify it as needed.

@eric-castleman I love this piece. It has a sweet, peaceful tone. If you want to add some playfulness you could add a little (orange or red) fish looking up at the boy. Or some personal items on the dock to lend to more story telling about the boy and who he is. I'm deep in a creative block right now I'm looking forward to getting past.