December WIP feedback - coming down to the wire
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Well, like I’m sure it has for a bunch of people, my December has turned into one of no time and crazy holiday-dictated work deadlines, so I haven’t had much time to work on this prompt. As soon as I read the prompt I knew what I was going to do, as we’ve lost a couple of great dogs the past couple years, so my desk was covered with depressing little doodles for a month
. Well, now that Christmas is over and I have some vacation time left, I’m trying to hit this one hard.My preferred illustration style is usually a comic-book ink and bright block color, mostly for speed, but I want to turn this into something softer and more based on tone and color than line, way out of my wheelhouse, so I’m open to suggestions. Still fine tuning my sketch at this point, so position and scale are all up for grabs.
Thank you in advance for any feedback!
In the room
In the other room
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@Aaron_T I prefer the top one more. Maybe some more details as the why they are talking about the dog...did she do something naughty? Break something, poo inside, ect or is it because she is old and at the end of her life? Or something else? Maybe some additional details and clues as to what they are discussing. I like that you chose the "she" to be an animal! Unique!
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@KaraDaniel Thanks for chiming in! I like having them in the room too but in trying to play with silhouette and color feel torn. And not to be a downer, but I was working towards an end-of-life conversation for an old dog.
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Current form. Still playing with colors and layout, fighting my tendency to do a hard line around every shape.
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After trying to move the people into the same room as the dog I kept feeling like it was too crowded, so I put them back out in the other room. Today I’ve been playing more and more with the color and adding in some details to better define the space. The biggest change has been changing the color of the dog. In my mind she has always been white, but it was too overpowering, so making the room much darker gives me more of a chance to highlight her face with the cast light from the other room. She might be too dark now though, now that I see it below. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I ran across Neha-Rawat’s December WIP post: https://forum.svslearn.com/topic/8469/december-prompt-wip-feedback-welcome that was pretty similar in structure, so I’m gleaning from the feedback there without getting to close to the same topic (I hope).
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I really like the dark dog versus the light dog and the lighter door too. I also like the softness of your rendering of the man and doctor. The time you've put in playing with the colors today has really paid off!
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@Aaron_T looking good! I like the dog darker it gives it a sadder feeling as well. If this an end of life discussion Is there something you could do to the dog to possibly make it look older? Like white beard or something? A minor thing is the cabinet behind the dog is almost of the same value as the dog so they sort of blend when looking at the image from afar. Each progression of the image is getting better and better!
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Thank you @deborah-Haagenson! This style is outside my norm so I’m learning as I go!
@KaraDaniel I had his face more visibly grey but then messed it up when I darkened her up, but thank you for reminding me to put that back in! and good call on the cabinet too...definitely need to adjust that since switching up her color. Thank you for the feedback!
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Greyed her face some more, and added some more of the background elements back in. Couldn’t help myself...I added a thin darker outline around the dog to help set her apart from the background even more, although lightening her muzzle up did a lot of that for me.
Like where this is headed...except for the subject matter, of course!
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@Aaron_T the piece reads very clearly to me. I immediately understood it to be an end of life conversation. To that goal though, I thought the hand/face pose of the owner you had in your initial sketch better captured the pain of the moment. Hand over eyes and head hung was more powerful display of emotion than head up and hand over mouth. Love the decision to move them into the other room. It adds a distance and separation that also heightens the emotion.
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@CharlieLP Thanks Charlie...that’s a good point. I’ll see how what I can do to bring back that pose. And welcome to the forum!
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Good call on the owners posture @CharlieLP ...I like this better and don’t think it reads over the top. Might have to call this one done even though I could probably continue messing with it. Traveling tomorrow and then the 31st is always busy, but we’ll see. Thanks for the feedback!
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@Aaron_T Nice work! I like how it turned out. There's gonna be a lot of potentially sad entries this month I think
