/u/HegelianHermit’s points were really good pieces of advice. Some other things I’d suggest:
Decide what sort of piece this is, like if it’s a minion or a piece of key art. That will dramatically influence your scope and composition, and let you focus on honing different skills while still building towards a portfolio. A minion uses a vertical layout to best fit the oval frame and keeps the character front and center, with extra details like the rockets’n’robots swarming the feet, background, etc. A full-blown key art illustration will give you more room to play with the environment and lots of different elements, more similar to what you currently have. Minions and spells and card art in general are a lot smaller in scope and come with a clearer compositional starting point, so they’re great for practicing characters and anatomy, material definition, etc. Key art is great for practicing more environments and varied compositions, and telling grander stories.
As a bit of more general compositional feedback: as Hermit said, the goblin is very muted, and it means he’s not visually the star of the show. The brightest point is the shotgun blast - if the light of that were also creating lots of interesting lighting and contrast on the goblin, your eye will be more drawn to him. The highest-contrast points are the lil’ robits and their eyes - tone them down from pure black to some level of grey and you’ll not only be able to give them more volume, but make it easier for you goblin to compete. You can also do a lot with levels of detail to draw the eye to him - if you really render him out nicely and flesh out his shading, and make the various background elements less rendered, detailed and contrasty by degrees, people will keep returning to him even as they check out the rest of the piece. You’ve already got some of that with your background mountains, but more degrees of it up through the mid ground and foreground will give you a lot to play with too. Laurel Austin is amazing at using levels of detail to steer your eye around her pieces, especially her Queen of Blades painting, check her stuff out if you haven’t.:)
A lot of your lighting here is very smooth and blended. Our (preferred, we have a lot of card artists doing a lot of slightly different styles:P) lighting style is that kinda chunky, brushstrokey shading method that you see in a lot of the card art as well as the boards, cardbacks and WoW, which tends to change up the hue a bit along with the tint. Charlene Le Scanff, Luke Mancini, Laurel Austin (again, for she is the queen of all things art), Matt Dixon and FirstKeeper all have lots of beautiful examples of this in their pieces.
I love those little robots - they look so excited to go out and do their jobs and the one with a mohawk cracks me up. The bottle rockets are a great background element and perfect for a goblin. It’s just a matter of making sure he stays the star of his show among all these awesome secondary details.
Hopefully that’s helpful! If you want clarification on any of it or have any other questions let me know, and keep up the good work!:)
Mike Donais
Awesome art!
Hadidjah
/u/HegelianHermit’s points were really good pieces of advice. Some other things I’d suggest:
Decide what sort of piece this is, like if it’s a minion or a piece of key art. That will dramatically influence your scope and composition, and let you focus on honing different skills while still building towards a portfolio. A minion uses a vertical layout to best fit the oval frame and keeps the character front and center, with extra details like the rockets’n’robots swarming the feet, background, etc. A full-blown key art illustration will give you more room to play with the environment and lots of different elements, more similar to what you currently have. Minions and spells and card art in general are a lot smaller in scope and come with a clearer compositional starting point, so they’re great for practicing characters and anatomy, material definition, etc. Key art is great for practicing more environments and varied compositions, and telling grander stories.
As a bit of more general compositional feedback: as Hermit said, the goblin is very muted, and it means he’s not visually the star of the show. The brightest point is the shotgun blast - if the light of that were also creating lots of interesting lighting and contrast on the goblin, your eye will be more drawn to him. The highest-contrast points are the lil’ robits and their eyes - tone them down from pure black to some level of grey and you’ll not only be able to give them more volume, but make it easier for you goblin to compete. You can also do a lot with levels of detail to draw the eye to him - if you really render him out nicely and flesh out his shading, and make the various background elements less rendered, detailed and contrasty by degrees, people will keep returning to him even as they check out the rest of the piece. You’ve already got some of that with your background mountains, but more degrees of it up through the mid ground and foreground will give you a lot to play with too. Laurel Austin is amazing at using levels of detail to steer your eye around her pieces, especially her Queen of Blades painting, check her stuff out if you haven’t.:)
A lot of your lighting here is very smooth and blended. Our (preferred, we have a lot of card artists doing a lot of slightly different styles:P) lighting style is that kinda chunky, brushstrokey shading method that you see in a lot of the card art as well as the boards, cardbacks and WoW, which tends to change up the hue a bit along with the tint. Charlene Le Scanff, Luke Mancini, Laurel Austin (again, for she is the queen of all things art), Matt Dixon and FirstKeeper all have lots of beautiful examples of this in their pieces.
I love those little robots - they look so excited to go out and do their jobs and the one with a mohawk cracks me up. The bottle rockets are a great background element and perfect for a goblin. It’s just a matter of making sure he stays the star of his show among all these awesome secondary details.
Hopefully that’s helpful! If you want clarification on any of it or have any other questions let me know, and keep up the good work!:)