My robot is having an existential crisis.

Tried something a little different this month. It's a combination of traditional watercolor and digital. Update: changed the lighting to more of a night scene.

I've been exploring two related options for the January contest, I'm curious of people have a preference for one over the other? I'd also appreciate any other feedback! I'm going for something minimalist but maybe they need to be pushed farther?
Option 1:

Option 2:

This is a great thread! I just wanted to add two additional "tricks of the trade", which a friend taught me and I used for this contest:

1. Add a top level layer set to the saturation blend mode, and fill with pure white (or any unsaturated color) so you can see what your image looks like in black and white. I find toggling this layer off and on as I'm adding colors helps me control the values better and see if I'm getting off track.
2. Another trick my friend taught me is to take a painting/illustration (by yourself or another artist) where you like the value distribution, and make small black and white copy you can refer to as you work (I put it on my phone). This can also keep you grounded as to the balance of values, e.g. it can help you notice if your illustration is getting to dark overall or doesn't have enough contrast.

The Heart and The Bottle by Jeffers isn't all about loneliness per se, but I find this spread to be beautifully evocative of what it feels like to miss one person in particular

I like where it’s going so far! Question about the tracks: they look close enough to something normal that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to know what they are or not? Maybe you could push their weirdness factor?

@burvantill I just started going through the class, but I'll post what I do as I work on it. Here are my building silhouettes, this definitely didn't come naturally to me and some of them are still a bit unclear.

@Ryan-Ehr Just wanted to give you a shout-out that yours was probably my favorite piece this month, and my money was on you being one of the winners.

@Brad-Newman One suggestion a friend gave me is to take an illustration where you like the distribution of lights/darks/contrast, turn it to greyscale and keep it visible as a guide while you're drawing. You're not trying to copy it per se, just using it as a guide if things start to skew too light or two dark (or not enough contrast).

I agree with the comments made so far. One other thing, you might consider choosing and emphasizing a strong focal point...for example currently all three birds about roughly the same size, you might consider introducing some more variation. Of course it depends on the story you're trying to tell.

@Brad-Newman @theprairiefox Does this feel any better composition-wise? I tried to give Bongo more room and adjust the sizes of the animals (and added one new one). Changes could have been too subtle though:

I agree with the @theprairiefox’s comments. In particular, looking at the image in greyscale is often really useful (I do this by adding a top layer set to a blend mode of saturation and then filling it with white). Looking at your piece in greyscale, it feels like the values might be a bit too clustered around the middle in terms of brightness. You might experiment with applying a levels adjustment to make the darks a little darker and the lights a little lighter. Here's quick example of what a small layers adjustment could look like (original on the left):

@theprairiefox @Brad-Newman thanks for the feedback, it’s really useful! I’ll try adjusting the sizes of the characters and see if I can give more variety as well as breathing room for Bongo. I’m a little unsure of how to treat the size of the frog and the toucan-like bird...they’re closer to the viewer than Clyde and Bongo, but I’m worried if I make them too big they’ll detract from the main characters. I guess I’ll just have to experiment.

I'd really appreciate any feedback for my June contest entry. I'm thinking especially about 3 things (although of course I'd love feedback on any aspect): 1) Is the concept working? Are there opportunities to push it further? 2) How is the color? I'm trying to give some color variation to the supporting characters without having them distract from Bongo and Clyde. 3) Is the composition working? This is a more complex scene than I'm used to in terms of the number of characters, etc. Thanks!

@Kevin-Longueil The mouth feels a little too curvy for me, I think because overall the rendering/anatomy is pretty realistic otherwise? One other thing, for me the fact that the alligator's eye is looking straight out and not at Bongo makes him feel scarier and less anthropomorphized, like he's just acting on primordial killer instinct. That could totally just be me, though

@LauraA I got that the floor was supposed to be water (I assumed ocean), but like @Coley it looked to me like they were fighting over the stuffed horse, so I didn't get that they were saving the animals from a flood.

@Coley There's a pretty full-featured brush creation studio in Procreate, which got expanded a lot with Procreate version 5. I think it's pretty different compared to Photoshop's though, so I'm not sure how much Lee's course would help (you probably want something specific to Procreate 5)