I feel the artists involved did their best in the time that they had. The team was made up of three artists who all provided artwork for the previous Harmony of Heroes project, of which I was very happy with. I expect they're looking for good quality, constructive feedback. Perhaps if you can provide that, it might be helpful for future projects!
Fair enough.
I looked up other work, and some of it was decent, but nowhere near professional production.
I see a lot of imagination, but likewise, a lack of understanding of the fundamentals. Namely composition, anatomy, lighting, and perspective.
I'll simply critique this particular piece and not the others since this is the one I commented on to begin with:
First off, the composition. It's all over the place, my eyes don't know where to focus, nor where I should begin nor end, I just kinda jump around, and I'm overstimulated by everything that's going on. There's no general flow with the piece, just a lot of impact, and not in a good way.
Second, the construction on ALL the characters is REALLY bad. The artist is clearly symbol drawing rather than fully understanding how to draw figures in perspective. It shows both lack of experience with anatomy and perspective. The poses are alright, but they're completely mitigated by how awful everything else comes out. This is also why the faces come off so terrible and honestly, barely resemble the characters themselves.
In addition, the lighting helps further this little bit. Too much impact, and the choice of rendering was bad. It's like the artist couldn't decide on which direction to take his piece. Realistic, or more cartoony. He clearly tried to do more realistic rendering, however, his lack of understanding on a lot of issues really shows here. He clearly wanted to go high-impact for a more "epic" feel, but it just flat out doesn't work due to the lack of detail on the models, and the poor construction.
You can blame time, and perhaps that is a factor, but I just see a general lack of experience. Good effort, and good imagination, but he needs to practice a lot before putting out any work.
If you'd like, I can make my take on this composition, same characters, but just... better done. It might take a while since I'm kinda busy with other work, but I can at least show you what I mean when I say this is just bad from the start. No amount of time would fix this one, since it lacks understanding of the fundamentals.
Marthmario
