[Art/Story Collaboration w/ Fabled] Dream's of Freedom

This is the Fletchling picture for the Story Fabled is writing. I'll be submitting this for the cash half of this collaboration.

The Story will be about a Fletchling that longed to be free. You can read all about it here

 

Claim!

 

@GhostlyGlaceon : Done!

This is a really cute piece!

The first thing that stood out to me was the bars of the cage. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, per se, but at first, I didn’t realize that they were bars! At first glance, because they’re straight up and down, they actually looked like part of the walls and particularly like individual boards of the floor. After a second, I understood that the image was being shown from inside a cage. While it was a mistaken impression on my part, it’s important to consider how your viewer might see your image, even if it’s an accident. In this case, I think the solution would be to draw more of the cage, and perhaps at different angles, in order to give it a clearer sense of perspective. For example, the classic Tweety Bird cage is usually rounded at the top and bottom:



You can see the bars rounding at the top, which would have served to separate them from the background in your image. You can also see the rounding of the base, and shading that creates perspective.

I really love the way you colored Fletchling’s body! The shades of red and blue really stand out nicely in the darker areas. The light blue highlights on Fletchling’s belly look really nicely done, too. One thing I would point out here is that the darker blue sections look to be inconsistently shaded. It seems like you may have been pressing down pretty hard with the dark blue. With colored pencil, things usually come out more smoothly if you press lightly with the dark shades, and then go back over those sections and press harder with a lighter shade. That allows you to blend the dark areas more effectively, leaving less of the grainy texture that colored pencils are prone to creating.

Overall, the shading on Fletchling is still really nice. I have a couple other small notes on this topic before I move on to something else. First, the lighter red shades on Fletchling’s head are a little difficult to distinguish from the darker shades. Don’t be afraid to introduce greater contrast in your works by adding in darker shadows where appropriate. In this case, I would actually recommend considering a darker color, maybe a shade of purple or maroon, for the darkest parts of Fletchling’s head. In particular, you could have used it as the outline for the parts of Fletchling’s head that appear next to the black of its tail in this image. I think part of the reason that the dark and light shades of red on its head are hard to distinguish is the fact that the lighter areas actually seem to have a darker outline than the shaded areas of its head. Introducing a darker shade could help mitigate that issue.

The last part of Fletchling’s body that I want to point out is its wing. You colored it in with a rather dark gray shade. It looks a little odd next to the vibrant blue and red hues of the rest of Fletchling’s body because while those areas are shaded, they’re still very saturated with color. I think the shading on Fletchling’s wing is appropriate, since it is in the shadow, but it could have been much, much lighter.

I’m really pleased with the effort you put into the setting of Fletchling’s daydream. I can see a few distinct layers of pine trees of different shades of green, and the coloring of the sky is smoothed out really nicely. My only note on the dream image is that some of the Fletchling’s outlines are really thick and dark, particularly around the white parts of its wings. Since they’re white, and not even in shadow at all, the outlines don’t need to be very dark either.

Finally, I want to bring things back around to the perspective of the piece again. This time, I want you to think more closely about exactly where the cage is in the room, and what angle it’s leaning at. There are two clues that should tip you off a little. First, we can see where the red walls of the room meet the ceiling. Also, that part of the ceiling meets at the top, like a ^ shape. For us to be seeing the ceiling, and for the joint to be pointed upwards, we would have to be looking at the room from way above. Now, that’s not totally impossible—this could be a room with a cathedral ceiling, and the cage could be resting on a beam way up in the rafters or something, but there aren’t really any clues to that effect in the picture. If the cage is not being hung way up in the rafters like that, then the border of the ceiling should really be flat or even pointing downwards. Meanwhile, the floor of the room would also look flatter, as opposed to the very dramatic angle at which it’s positioned.

If we assume this cage has vertical bars and a flat bottom, then the bottom should be hanging parallel to the ground. But in this picture, it seems like the cage is kind of sideways. If it were parallel to the ground, we would see at least part of the bottom in the shot. In order to illustrate this, I drew a quick sketch:


View: http://imgur.com/a/8sN9n


The thick black lines represent the field of vision that you used to draw this picture. If we can see the place where the floor meets the wall, then we are probably viewing Fletchling’s cage from above—meaning we should be able to see the bottom of the cage. The foreground of the picture, however, is drawn from a straight-forward perspective, as though the field of vision were parallel to the ground. If that were the case, then we should really only see the back wall behind Fletchling’s head.

The interesting thing is that if the foreground and background were drawn from the same top-down perspective, it actually would have fixed the previous issue where it seemed like Fletchling’s cage was physically located way too high in the room. If we were looking down at the cage instead, it could have created a cool sweeping perspective as though Fletchling were caught in some high tower instead of a regular room. In that case, it wouldn’t look like it was the cage hanging too high in the room, it would look like we, the viewer, were the one looking down from high up. In that case, the angle of the floor and ceiling would make a lot more sense.

Grade

While there are some perspective issues in the room, and some places where your shading could be a little smoother, this is a really nice piece and showcases plenty of effort. I’ll give it a 45/45, so you earned $10,000!

But wait, there’s more!

After discussing with @Synthesis, who graded the story that @Fabled wrote, we have determined that you both successfully completed the Art/Story collaboration! Therefore, Fabled may claim $10,000, and you, Ghost, may claim a Fletchling! Please post here to claim your extra prizes.

Congratulations! As always, please feel free to reach out to me at any time if you would like me to expand on anything I’ve said in my critique.

 

Claiming my fletchling and 10k thank you XD. The perspective i was going for witht he cage was the viewer was in the cage and can see how fletchling sees things but i agree i poorly showed that. Thank you though.