Mermay the 4th Be With You

Hey! Fantastic! :D I've really enjoyed seeing your process up to this point, especially now that the illustration is almost finished. I only made a few adjustments, mainly to the glow on the swords. You can achieve this effect by using a Colour Dodge layer. It’s a great way to create that luminous, magical glow. However, paint with a 30% oppacity, so you can control the glossiness when painting. Because of that, I also adjusted some of the reflected light on the characters so the lighting feels a bit more believable and consistent with the brightness of the swords. I also darkened the plants in the foreground to create better separation between them and the characters. This helps clarify the different planes and improves the overall depth of the scene. Hope this helps!

Hey! Good work so far! It keeps improving with every revision. The main thing I would adjust here is the proportions of the characters. Darth’s head felt a bit too large, especially when comparing the scale and distance between him and the character in front. For the scale to feel more convincing, I think Darth should be slightly smaller than Ahsoka (it is Ahsoka, right? haha). I also tried correcting the arm positioning a bit, especially the foreshortened arm. Foreshortening is definitely tricky, I’ll admit that haha. As for Ahsoka: technically, we should only be seeing the right arm, not the left one, since the left arm would be mostly hidden by the body and the head from this angle. Showing too much of it makes it feel a bit disconnected from the body. The way I sketched it isn’t perfectly correct either, but it’s mainly to show how the head and torso should overlap and cover part of the arm. Hope this helps!

Hey there! Good work so far However, here are a few things I think could help improve the piece. First of all, the flow of the composition. Try to avoid cutting off parts of the character, in this case, the mermaid’s tail. Usually, cropping parts of a character works better in close-up shots or tighter compositions, not in wider shots like this one. If you draw the tail following a more curved line, it’ll create a stronger visual flow between both characters and also make the mermaid feel more dynamic overall. The anatomy of the front-facing character feels a bit off as well. The bending of the torso doesn’t feel very believable, which makes it seem as if the character has no back and that the tail connects almost directly to the shoulders. I’m not an expert at drawing foreshortened poses either, I still find them difficult lol. Bu notice how I drew the connection between the rib cage and the pelvis. Even though those forms overlap, the structure feels much more believable this way. As for the mermaid design itself: I’m not a huge fan of the fin extending across the entire back. I think it would work better if it started around the middle of the back instead, and if it had more flow to it, almost like fabric. That would help avoid the shape feeling too stiff or rigid. Hope this helps!

Hi! Sounds like a good idea to compile ideas together to form complexer ideas. The conservativeness in pose and design occurs only due to two reasons, one is you fears pushing it too far, second is you don't know what exactly to or how exactly to push it ? I would suggest you to work more on your understanding of simple forms and to limit the forms you use in illustrations to the forms you really understands. I believe that working on forms would help you because it would give you a "Framework" to make whatever you draws believable. No matter how absurd your actual idea may have been. This really lifts off that fear of pushing something soo far that its unbelievable. Plus, in the long term, focussing on the forms gives you more of a control over what you wishes to put on paper. You can be more intentful by manipulating the shapes, proportions, perspective of the subject to your liking and not necessarily having to conform to the references. So , to take action from here to increase your understanding of form, i would suggest two exercises for you. First is is reference breakdown. Take any one subject of your choice, and break it down into the simple forms that you have practiced and understands. Notice how its proportion and dimensions are different from a standard cube, how its shapes differs . Second one is form manipulation. Take any intresting complex form ( that you can breakdown). Draw a cube. Then try to manipulate the cube in steps of increasing complexity until you reaches the target form. For each manipulation, try drawing it from another angle. If you can't, just practice that and build library for it.