Hi, before I critique your actual designs I just want to give some general set up critique.
Now, there is no "best" way to have a set up but in my opinion it's good to show both a male and female version of the design.
For all of your designs you've only posted females, which doesn't automatically give the person viewing the design the idea of what the male will look like.
Secondly, I think you should show off more traits in your preview. While you are very unlikely to see any pet of this theme with even a natural 4 vis, having multiple visibles at once lets the person looking at the designs know how different genes and mutations work with each other. I like to try to go for a 6 vis each time, but if you feel that is overly bulky 4 or 5 can work as well. Some people like to show no vis vs 6 vis comparisons, or 3 vs 6, or 0 vs 3, or 0 vs 3 vs 6.
Thirdly, when it comes to posting male and female with multiple visibles each, my final point is that they should be showing off different traits. Now, a lot of people do not do this. And I understand why. They want the pictures to match and they already picked the traits that show off the design best. But showing how a variety of traits work for the themed pet is, in my opinion, more important than showing how great an ideal combination of traits work.
Now that I've blathered about format, I'll try to actually give some design feedback!
Before I get into specific designs, I just want to say in my opinion when working from a photograph the most important thing you can do for your design is colour matching.
While sometimes you have to give more than is actually in the picture because of one thing or another, you should absolutely try to be hitting as exact of shades from said picture as you can for the colours you are directly pulling. I've noticed that quite often this is ignored and a looser inspiration is taken. This is *absolutely* fine if you don't need to show a picture for a side by side comparison and can be overlooked if the design is really fantastic by itself while not looking too much like the picture, most of the time it just makes your design look discordant.
On some of your designs you've done colour matching rather well, on others not quite as much.
On your Aeridini design I believe that your red orange and purple combination makes the design look darker than it really is, and that since the contrast between them is low you lose a lot of chance to make the design pop. After plugging it into the generator and checking other g3s, I believe that the orange and the base colour really pop together, which is something you were missing in your example. The black eyes in this design don't really do anything but add to realism to the picture, and in fact hurt it when it comes to nebula. I like all your colours used except the dark red orange which I really feel like adds absolutely nothing to the design. It's not a pretty colour, it's not really in the design, it brings down the contrast, and it's much darker than any other colour in the design (excluding the black eyes.) I feel like this design has potential, but could have been a lot better expressed.
Your bulbori design is very dark, and it reminds me a lot of the chocolate candy bulbori design. That peachy colour you used for c2 and m1 wasn't expressed in the picture (except maybe in a very slight fade) and doesn't seem to add anything to the design in my opinion. The purple you used was a bit too bright and didn't really have enough red in it for it to be flattering or like the original picture. Your g2 colour confuses me, as it is red orange and there was nothing even close to that in what you were working with. I like your g3 colour, it is easy to see and shows a lot of contrast. But your g1 colour is almost lost when it's alone. Overall I feel like the design doesn't have much balance in it.
Just looking at your lighira design without playing in the generator at all, I like it. However when I do I see you used a *lot* of very similar colours which make the designs especially in g3, g3 and g1 together, and m1 traits blend to a degree that's not very appealing. This design has real potential but you need to use a wider variety of colours to express it, it just looks like blocks of the same colour all over it at the moment.
Just looking at your luffox, my first impression is that it looks nice. Getting into the generator I'm immediately concerned at the amount of white you've used, though. And then looking further I see more in the very similar colours. Your c1 and your g3 are literally the exact same colour, making the design extremely hard to notice. I like your g2 but I feel like the bright orange would be better if it were a slightly more subdued gold or gold orange, closer to the picture. This design is overall very lacking in colour, having 4/10 colours be white and then having 4/6 of the remaining colours be very similar makes this design seem very flat.
Your lunemara design is very bright, as befitting a tropical fish. Looking at it, though. I see the same abundance of similar colours. In this case, you've removed a lot of the chances for the lunemaras wings to show off colours because you made c3 and m1 the same. I also feel like that blue you've used was not very expressed in the photo and thus not especially necessary in this design at all. With as bright as the rest of your design is, the darkness of your m3 seems very unfitting with it. I don't really have a problem with your use of the purple, the orange, the yellow green, or the lime in this design. They could have been tweaked a bit in shade but they still looked nice. Good concept design, needs some tweaks for execution.
I think this post has already gotten very long! If you want my feedback on the rest of your designs let me know, but for now I think I'll stop this massively long post, haha. Sorry if I seem very rant/rambly in this. I didn't intend to get so long winded, I promise. |
