Any comments or critiques?

[lpetiti]

Hi everyone! In an effort to get more comfortable with my art and think less about my anxieties, I decided to redesign an old D&D character of mine. Any thoughts or comments?

[Nyrryl Cadiz]

@lpetiti i think you can work on the hands and her pose more. She's currently a bit stiff.

[Griffin McPherson]

@lpetiti I agree with @Nyrryl-Cadiz that the pose is a bit stiff. I you may want to consider turning the bird to face the other direction to balance out the composition. You have a lot of airbrushing effects going on which is easy to get sucked into being it can make you feel like you are doing tons of rendering when in reality an airbrushed look is usually not the texture needed to convey a form. For example on the bird it makes it appear too smooth and not natural like a birds feathers. I would also recommend taking out some of the sparkles, at the moment they are a bit distracting from the rest of the image.

[Jordi Ventura]

hey @lpetiti I like to do paintovers so I did one from your beatiful painting!

I think you have a good base, you just need to push more your lighting and have more contrast. This will help to integrate everything togheter and win in realism.

This is very easy to do, just use do a new layer on multiply mode, select the area you want to shadow with the laso tool and bucket it. You can play with the opacity of the layer and also play with Vibrance - Hue/saturation - Color balance options to find more cool colors!
I recomend you to try is very easy/fast and you can get awesome results!

I tried to integrate the body with the head, something feels wierd, I tried to algin head and body. Also I didnt notice she was casting some spell until I was finishing the paintover, if you do a screen layer you can pop up with flash and saturated colors and make some magic happens!

Hope that is helpfull, overall I think is a beatiful drawing, love the idea, the character design ( she has a cool clothes! )and the expresion of the girl is beatiful. For me you jsut need to more contrast between light and shadow to make it pop-up more!

[lpetiti]

@Jordi-Ventura Thank you so much! Your paint over really helps, and I appreciate you calling this beautiful. I know that pushing my values/contrast is something that i.struggle with a lot, so not only do I appreciate your crit of it, I also REALLY appreciate that you gave me some suggestions for how to do it. I never thought to try using Multiply.

[lpetiti]

@Griffin Thank you! When I got to the feathers of the phoenix I took one look at them and thought "well..here's something I've never done before". You're right, eventually I just started making marks.