I received like 25+ pieces for critique in less than a day so I had to shut it down cause if there were more to pick from I'd have an even harder time giving a critique to just one... ;__; I are softy.

So this week ONLY I'm doing three, one today, Wednesday and then Friday and next week I'm not doing any cause I'll need a break. This one alone took me more than the hour and a half I'd allotted towards it. O_O

So this is the page we'll be looking at from

[link]

Ok, so here we go!

First thing I did was convert the page to greyscale. Not a lot of people think to do this, but it's very important when you're starting off to see how much contrast you see in your levels.



1. These panels are the most contrasty
2. This panel's focal point is ALL middle grey. There's so little contrast that the most contrasting thing on this panel is that bulls eye.
3. notice that this girl in the background is LIGHTER in value than the girl in the foreground. This is no good. It's obvious from the line art that the girl in the background is important but there's no reason she needs to stand out more than the girl in the foreground. If anything, like I said, the lineart does a good job of framing her in the panel so that your eye is drawn to her already.

So notice that in general this page is entirely middle grey. This is a problem I myself have, so I totally understand how easy it is to do, but it's not really a good thing and something you should try to keep in the back of your mind. What you REALLY want is for there to be a nice distribution of dark grey, middle grey and light grey all separating foreground from middle ground from back ground as well as important story telling elements from unimportant background information.

Now I'm not saying background always has to be dark grey. You might just want to make it a different value from the foreground, it's one way of really creating depth and distance.



Here's a panel where you can see even in the color what I mean. In my adjustments I made the characters outside the restaurant even brighter that they were originally along with making them more orange. Making all of the elements of those two people in the foreground very warm colors with a heavy orange overtone makes them more of a single unit tied together by the color orange and therefore less interesting to your eye. And that's ok! Cause they don't really matter. If it's extraneous info, DON'T DRAW TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO IT. Crowd scenes are perfect for this sort of thought. If you want to point out a particular point in a crowd, make it the most colorful or unique color in a sea of similar colors.

Now I created that really light highlight on the glass between the couple and the shadowed couple primarily to make them pop more. It does harshly separate the shadow element from the people element, but it kind of works in the sense that you notice there are people outside, and that there are people INSIDE. And that heavy black shadow + the darker wall next to them gives it a weight that draws your eye to it.

The only thing I really don't like about the changes I made to this panel is that it makes this panel one of the most attention grabbing panels on the page. It's good since it's the first panel so it pulls your eye up to the top, but I dunno if this page warrants that much attention... HRM...



This is the panel I was talking about being too middle grey. You can see in the before and after panels the difference a little more contrast can make. I tried to make sure I wasn't going too far as to change the palette too much, so hopefully this is ok with you M.
Also, a little color background. So I made sure to warm up the left side of the panel which is the window side, and have it go bluer and cooler as it progressed to the right. You can see it in the entire scene from the floor to the shadows to the wall. I think this helps out with the way you've established your scene in later panels.
AND DON'T FORGET SHADOWS, MISTER! If you want to cast a shadow on the floor, you have to do the same on the table. You can cheat a little and omit it from scenes he's not a huge part in if you want to do that, but in a situation like this, his back should be in light, his face in shadow, and he should cast a shadow on that there table!



Like I said! shadow that front side of his face! Also, that glow along the side of him, make sure to make it follow the contours of his body and not just be some big ol' circle!



Just quick anatomy notes. The corner of her eye socket nose area I modified the rendering and for him I just made him a little darker and made the strip of shadow a little thicker. PLUS the area around his mouth isn't right. It doesn't need to be two strips of muscle like that, it really should be rendered as one.



A few things on this panel and this is the last panel because oh my god I've spent way too many hours working on this at this point. XD

First of all, look at the color versus the greyscale. Notice the girl with the camera in the background. I blued her up a bit so that she'd be the same color as the rest of the people/objects on the same ground plane as her and darker in value than the girl in the foreground.

In all honesty I should've brightened the girl in the foreground up a little more but dammit, I'm tired and I want to eat ice cream cake with my husband so I'm going to keep on truckin!

Also, notice the table. I think you were going for a bit of a reflection?? But it was just reading as a pink blob to me. If you want to do reflective surfaces you have to give your shapes definition AND you need to be consistent about it. Like the rest of the stuff on the table has to reflect too.

On the right side of the panel you'll notice that lone chair. I blued it up to push it further into the background.

Finally, notice the bar behind the foreground characters and right infront of those background characters? I put some purple in it and took out the green. Here's a color mixing trick, if you want to keep your colors from being muddy, you have to use a transitional color. Like to get from this reddish orange to this blue background, use the color between them, purple to help with that warm to cool transition. This applies ANYTIME You want to use any sorts of colors that aren't analogous. i.e. you want to a red light on a green figure? You need to use a yellow/orange base coat under that red to help the red from going brown. Just remember that when you color a color on another color that sometimes the transition is so extreme that you need to remember to put in a middle color to bridge that transition. Basically you need to paint the rainbow in order.

And so here you go, a gif of some of the adjustments I made:



So I mostly covered color today and not rendering. I'm going to cover that one next on wednesday.