So, as most of you know, there was a call out for artists for the site. And I was one who applied.

And I've already submitted most of my pieces, but I LOVE to be critiqued, no idea why. So, with the go ahead of another artist, I'm going to let all of you fine folk look over my submissions and tell me what you think!









(sidenote: Yes I just noticed those random white spots on the tail, fixing that right now >_>;;

I... might be able to give a critique, but I'd have to warn you that I don't pull punches when give them. I try to give constructive criticism, but my art professors back in college kind of beat the 'nice' out of me for them XD

SO, if you'd like a 100% honest critique, let me know.

<:3 My C/Cs come with a warning lable XD

@13thmaiden,
OOPS... forgot to ping

@Artistnotfound

Go for it honey, I got a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, I've been beaten in every direction before. I'll attempt to defend of course, but I'm willing to take whatever opinions and ideas come along. Whole point of constructive criticism after all!

I do warn though, I was taught by my professors that even if you beat a piece to death, find atleast ONE nice thing to say about it so you don't totally ruin a person's perspective of themselves. XD So I ask you atleast to follow that.

@13thmaiden
Hey there, as a site artist, I'll go ahead and give you a critique on the kinds of things we look for and find when going over submissions!

Something I notice on your edit submissions is the lines. Inking can be a bit of a task to master, and sylestia looks for smooth line quality. One of the best ways to achieve this is to make fast strokes. It doesn't always go the right way the first time (or second or tenth), but drawing a long fast stroke is much smoother than a slow stroke (which picks up every wiggle and wobble you make). I have Ctrl+Z (undo) hotkeyed to my tablet, and I will often redraw a line about 2-5 times to get the shape right with the smoothness of a fast stroke. I actually feel rather lucky if the line is perfect on my first stroke!

@Axolotl, the form is good on the edits, and the concept of the design is also well made. Like stated above, the lines are a bit wobbly, but this can be fixed with the right technique. The shading also seems to look a bit wobbly (I would recommend the same technique as with the flow, long fast strokes!). You should aim for smooth flowing edges.

@Baby Seal, again the design is well thought up and I can see the effort that went into it. The one thing that is a big drawback however is the lack of shape in the design. The easiest place to see this in at the border of the foreleg, stomach, and back leg. The design bleeds right into the stomach from the foreleg, and back leg from the stomach without allowing for the curvature and covered parts of the body. You can also see a bit of bleeding from the back to the tail. When drawing on the base, good shape sense is key to create the illusion of a design being 3 dimensional while existing on a 2 dimensional surface.

@Hair, I would actually like to see the original size you worked at for this. Our bases are all 500x500, and it's best to work at that size so you can match the line size and quality. When shrunken down onto your mermaid tail, the hair lines look thicker and thinner in different places. Also if the hair shown is actual size, it is quite a bit fuzzy. We use very solid lines on Sylestia, and even when shrunken down, fuzzy lines will still look fuzzy (this is an easy fix solved by using a different brush type!) The style of the hair is very cute, and tbh I'd love it to be an official style in the future :3 The style of shading is much better than the Axolotl example, so whatever technique you used for shading this, keep at it!

@Mermaid Tail, the tail is very well done, and good job layering it over the female legs (as that's what future tails will be doing that we've planned on! <3). Once again the wobbly lines detract from the detail of the tail, and areas (particularly visible in the fluke) look like they have varying thickness of lines. When I ink I usually use a size 3 brush (in SAI or Photoshop) for the main parts of the object I'm inking, and 2.3 (in SAI, 2 in Photoshop) for smaller detail areas inside the main object. I do like the scaling that you used for the tail, so well done there!

Also just one last note, though this is just a personal preference of mine (not shared by the site! just me!), the way the mermaid tail is shaded and highlighted below the crotch area make it look like two legs fused together. While the human hips will cause a bit of a dip in the crotch area, below that should be a full on tail. Adding that separating highlight and shading below where legs would be make it look more like she's wearing a tail suit, rather than it being an actual tail the scaling at the stomach has created (in cases like this, it's good to look at whale/dolphin/carp tails to get a feel for how the lower half should look as a full fish <3).


So overall you have a really good sense and feel, it merely needs to be honed and refined to match site quality (the lines being the most important to practice!). Keep at it, I have a feeling you'll get there soon!

@Solistia

Thank you for the great critique!

I had earlier a LONG post to explain to most of the addressed points, but then my internet decided, "NOPE I'MA EAT THIS POST! OMNOMONOMNOM."

Yeah, just my luck.


Anyways, instead of going through all that again, I'll try to hit the key points.

You're right about the lines, I'm naturally a small drawer, but I was trained whenever given something, draw on it huge size so that no-one can see the 'wobbles' as you pointed out. XD The hair actually went through 5 different line retraces, and is separated on 2 layers, so that could be a big reason for it's odd organic changing between thickness.

As I work now, I have Photoshop6, but it seems everyone else has PaintSAI and I really prefer it's lines. Do you know any way I can get a hold of it somehow?

On these pieces I drew by hand (first mistake, should have stuck with pen-tool, but just got PS6 right then after fighting hours with GIMP *who hates pen tool*, and I got worried the pen was making the lines too toothy.) which shows my horrible wobbliness even though I drew them so huge. My tendency is long draw out strokes, probably another reason they don't look near as smooth if you guys tend to use short, fast strokes. Easy enough to change between.

Those scales were a labor of love man, 3 layers of hand drawn U's worked and erased XD;; really does do the touch though. You're right about the shading in the crotch area, it tends to appear on alot of mermaids and naga figures I've seen around, so I decided it was better to just add in because of giving the biological illusion of "Stuff" (not real stuff stuff, but the idea that's the area...Does that make ANY sense? XD). It's an easy enough to mend and take out.

On the harbor seal, I can see your point, it is alittle much. I didn't want it so understated you couldn't see it, but at the same time I didn't want to over do it like my first one. Again, an easy enough to reshape to better form to the body.

(my biggest woe is the fact I always put a big color background to catch all outer colors outside the lines, can't believe I totally missed some spots ;^; ))

Anyways, Thank you again for the critique! Ahhh, I should have done this so much sooner, I could had made perfect resubmissions then. Oh well, too late now I suppose! I just have to hope they see enough potential in me to still hire me ^^;;.

((Seriously though, if you use Photoshop6, what brush do you use? Cause I can't figure anything better than the soft opaque pastel brush. Any tips on better brushes would be awesome, or how to get PaintSAI))

I use SAI for my sketching and inking, and CS4 for coloring (on PC).

My recommendation to catch things that go outside the lines is as follows (photoshop lesson and tricks!):
Use a transparent background. It's really easy to see if the color isn't filled in enough, especially with a nice medium dark red. I use that medium dark red to block out the needed area. Once you have the area properly blocked, you can use masking/clip layers to keep your shading, highlighting, and secondary colors inside.

To make a clip layer, when you make a new layer above your base layer, use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+G, or hold your mouse in between both layers while holding the alt key (you should see the mouse turn into two intersecting cirlcles) then click and that will clip or unclip the top layer. (play around by drawing wildly in the clipped layer, you'll see it doesn't go outside the base area!)

Then, once you're done with everything, since Sylestia's system can't handle clipped layers you'll have to pull them out of the clip. In order to keep them within the base area, Ctrl+click the preview picture in the layer window for the base layer (this will select all the non-transparent parts of the layer). Inverse the selection with Ctrl+Shift+i (so this will reverse the selection to everything transparent on your base layer), then simply click on each clipped layer in your layer window and hit the "delete" button. This will clear out anything not in the base layer area. Then you can unclip your layers and everything will still only be inside the base layer.

If this is confusing, I'll try to put together a video tutorial for all my little tips and tricks :3 (hooray for 12 years of working with photoshop |Db )

As for the brush size, you may just need to reset your brushes. Once resest, the top row of brushes should be the "Hard Round" set. Use 3px of the Hard round set! Also, since photoshop brushes are just a tad fuzzier than SAI brushes, once you're done inking, using a Sharpen filter once to help make the lines clearer. Once again, this setting is when you're working at template size of 500x500.

Also, I LOATHE the pen tool with a serious passion, I always use the brush tool for inking with very rare exception (like for geometrically accurate shapes, I use the marquee tools and various other tricks). Any circles that aren't tiny I don't bother inking by hand, I use the circle marquee tool :3 But definitely use what you're comfortable with (the pen tool just takes forever!)

And this is a general note not just for you, but for everyone trying to mimic the shading style. We use a combination of hard cel and soft cel shading. The main shading is done hard cel, so it'll have a very solid look (no fuzziness). We then add a gradient or lasso+feather or large airbrush to help soften areas that need a more broad shade (done on the same layer as the hard cel). Once that's done, we erase around some of the edges for a backlighting effect (AH that was the point I missed earlier! You forgot to backlight on your examples). The backlighting is fairly easy, once your shading is done, just erase the shading along the edges on the reverse side of the light source and elsewhere necessary for the 3D illusion.

Gosh, sorry for the wall of text XD

@Solistia

No no that's quite alright! I love getting tips and tricks. I've never tried a clipping layer (I'm just the lazy cow who grabs the object with magic wand and works in the selection XD) though sometimes when you make changes and whatnot you'll get those wandering buggers...(*stares at white spots on mertail* >_> )

Ahhhhh....okay, I was wondering if that was just me noticing it randomly or if it actually WAS something. I wasn't sure so I never did include it, tsktsk to myself.

And really?? Huh...I gotta go back and look at that then, how strong a sharpen are you using? Thankfully my basics are still in normal state, I just changed between a type of brush, so the number 3 is still in default setting.

XD and I KNOW, pen tool does take forever, but it's always been my quick cheat for less wobbly lines. Like I said, my tendency is long drawn out lines, mostly cause when I do short strokes they look more sketchy to me XD;; But then that's probably my own hand.

OOooh! Don't I terribly hate myself for not having done this sooner XD But Fai did close submissions today =x I would hate to be evil and throw her some more after she closed it all XD;;

But I did plan to make an item and throw it in the suggestion forums...I can always try these tricks on that...

T__T promise me if you get the job get that hair implemented into the game. LOVE IT SO

@Cerberus

^^;; I can't promise anything, but I'm sure if there's enough garnered like for it, the admins will probably think about adding it! It has a few fixes it needs on lines and a bit of back-lighting, but I'm glad you like my design! <3 Mermaids are one of my favorite mythical creatures (well, of the human variety), so I tried to get a kind of wet wavy look, like one would have just coming out of the water.

Because trying to have it all floaty like in the water would probably require alot of explanation XD (like anime mystery breeze hair O.O!)