Feedback on Filipino Halloween piece
-
Hello, I have been freelancing as an illustrator for about a year now and want some critiques on my Halloween piece.
I know there are definitely areas where I can improve. I will start by admitting that I sort of rushed myself on this piece. It took me about a week to finish. I wanted to make sure I could publish this on Halloween.
The description of this piece is what would 'Halloween look like in the Philippines?'. It depicts Filipino children of all colors and sizes walking among monsters of Philippine mythology on Halloween night during the Covid-19 2020 pandemic.
I tried my best to make every character's gestures be expressive. This is meant to be a busy piece intentionally, so I'd like to know if I executed that aspect well enough to be justified. This piece is also formatted to fit on Instagram, so it's split in half. I was hoping that formatting it like this would not have disrupted the flow of the drawing.
If you need full descriptions of what is going on:
- A tiyanak is hung over a window grossly gobbling down candy while wearing a mask.
- A sirena is wearing a scuba mask, as people dive into a minipool to grab some apples. She's standing next to a 'siyokoy' with more 'cthulu' features and there is a female berberoka hiding in the pool.
- An aeta person dressed as an American soldier receives candy from a wak-wak, while berbalang grabs a piece with their tail while she's not looking.
- The 'white lady ghost' drops ghost candy to three 'kumakatok' children.
- A Filipino girl dressed as a Filipina suffragette 'Josefa Llanes Oscoda' walks by with a duwende.
- A pugot hides in the background in the middle of the picture, lit only by a candle.
- A bungisngis hands out candy to very young Filipino children dressed as nurses.
- A mestizo pinoy boy helps a sigbin how to sanitize their paws.
- A kapre blows away one of the corona viruses that he sees while sitting on the roof of a house.
- A religious Filipino boy dressed as a pari prays to a cross with a rosary necklace on it, next to candles and a haunted framed photograph of the virgin Mary.
- A brunette Chinay Anggitay helps pull the tartanilla of a tikbalang dressed in a barong-tagalog.
- Black butterflies represent death in the Philippines.
- Various manananggals fly in the sky, some are holding pumpkins, one young one is peering over by a palm tree.
- An amomongo passes by carrying too much candy than he can carry.
- The covid-19 is inspired by Filipino symbols such as the sun of the Philippine flag.
-
@Michael-Angelo-Go Hi -it's good to share your work and seek other's feedback.
I really like your cultural and historical perspective on Halloween. I also like work that has a lot of smaller stories in them. On that note maybe in the future choose a main story, one you gravitated towards when you were a child and then have the others in the background as a supporting cast. Then you can compositionally design around the main story with colour and lighting.
I find the orange glowing "covid-19 Filipino symbol sun" very distracting because of it's colour. Those spots are applied really rough almost like an after thought. I do think the characters in masks are enough because everyone understands that nowadays that's the new current reality.
Hope that helps a bit,
-
@Michael-Angelo-Go wow. There’s a lot going on here haha.
You’ve placed a lot of thought on each character’s design! And I love the mini stories you have going on representing different Filipino symbols and practices, but I agree with @Heather-Boyd Perhaps choose a focal point then thumbnail different perspectives to see which angle would show case the main subject.
It might be good to think of the whole piece as a gesture drawing with one action line that leads the eye around the piece. It might also be good to explore value sketches so the characters won't look like they have their own light source.
Lee White has a very helpful video on thumbnailing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghVE4V5FfU
His channel is a gold mine of free advice we should take XD
If this is for an animation background layout work though it totally hits the mark. Your style is pretty consistent and you have the technique down I feel.
-
@Michael-Angelo-Go i actually thought those orange orbs were Santilmos