Crit for Silje

The second image critique I was asked to do. 

This one was a little different because the image is so very stylized. I didn't tackle the anatomy because it was less important. There are situations in which realistic rendering just isn't the point, and that's something I feel like people on DeviantART just don't understand. A lot of the time you get people who are so hung up on anatomical correctness that they're totally incapable of seeing beauty and freshness in less sophisticated art. Because of the personal nature of this painting I didn't feel like I wanted to change anything about the figures, but instead wanted to address their interaction with the environment, and some possible changes in lighting. 

1. The original. This was done in acrylic, so I'll be discussing acrylic painting techniques. A problem a lot of people have when painting is using too much white to mix. You get a very pasty painting, chalky and uninteresting. I, myself, have made this mistake many times. Fortunately there is an easy, and delightful fix, and that is glazing. Glazed color looks even BETTER than mixed color, because the light moves through the transparent glaze and bounces off the white, back at the eye, creating a luminous, almost stained-glass look. I have been astonished continuously in my own work with how well glazing will make a dull painting pop. 

So to glaze, all you need is acrylic glazing liquid and a little bit of paint mixed in. There IS a learning curve, so I suggest practicing on poop art until you feel confident. Getting an even coat is important. 

2. I kind of mimicked how glazing might work with a layer set to multiply, but the quality of a glazed painting just can't show in digital, sadly. 

3. I wanted to address the water here.  Art doesn't have to be realistic to be enjoyable. There are paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars hanging in galleries with weirdly, flat-out wrongly rendered objects. It's fine. That's not the point. I'm going to assume, however, that the artist would like to be able to realistically render water before making the decision to stylize. The most important deal with water is that, by and large, it's pretty freaking flat. And by flat, I mean parallel to the horizon. Even when wavy, there's a kind of logical flatness to the waves as the water is being pulled down by gravity. So while the compulsion might be to follow the shoreline with highlights, this is not the way reflections on water behave. The surface will show marks or highlights parallel to the horizon line. 

My version is sadly very digital looking (sorry!) but hopefully you can imagine what it would look like in the acrylic, matching the original style. 

4. In the original the figures don't agree in lighting with the background. This might be intentional or might not. There could be a spotlight on them. They could be emitting an internal glow. The original is kind of a jumping-off point for more carefully articulated light. I chose to go a more natural route and make the figures darker to make them appear as though they are in a night time space, though I didn't make them as dark as they *would* be. I fudged that detail a little bit in order to keep more of their original color.  I also added my orb there (minus rim lighting) to show light direction on the figures. The assumption here is that there is a warmer light falling just on the figures. 

This kind of shading is possible with glazing in a dark brown and building up layers to round out the shapes. 

5. Step 4 was too dark so I added some highlights to make it a lowkey piece of art with some bright areas of interest. In this case white paint can be used selectively to have a very strong highlight and it doesn't take away from the saturation of the image. If anything it enhances it, just as long as too much white isn't added and white isn't mixed in. 

 This is not a realistic night scene. Realistically, a night scene would be pretty much just a big, dark nothing. Even bright starlight wouldn't be enough to bring up bright highlights. This is one of those cheats that you just kind of have to go for, and which painters have been doing for thousands of years. It's an example of where painters consciously make the decision to warp what they're seeing in order to make a more compelling painting. 

This is not finished by any means. It's just a few steps further to marrying figures and background. 

I also added detail to the eyes. 

To be perfectly honest, I am not crazy about my result. I feel like perhaps a better route would be to keep the figures more saturated and lighten up the ground. Or perhaps create a kind of inner glow. All of these decisions, though, are up to the artist. I'm just showing a possible outcome in development. For certain, the figures need to look like they are occupying the same space, and that means treating them similarly in terms of light, but that lighting can be different.