Reign of the Sea [Art/Story]

Title: Reign of the Sea
Target: Horsea
In collaboration with K'sariya. ([WaR + Art/Story ] Royalty)

Spoiler: proof

Edit: done in watercolor and colored pencil on watercolor paper; geometrism inspired by the works of Terese Nielsen

 

Claim!

 

@Morru : Done!

Man, this was a Super Tough piece to curate. The first thing I did after opening up your piece was to go read K’Sariya’s story to see if I could figure out what was going on. It… didn’t help a ton.

So let me dive into what worked well here and the areas where you could improve. In order to provide a worthwhile critique of your style, I’ll be using Control Magic by Terese Nielsen as a comparison piece:



In comparing your two pieces, I want to pay attention specifically to what’s being portrayed and how it’s being portrayed. In order to do that, let me first summarize what we see in Nielsen’s piece to provide the framework by which I’ll critique yours today. It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s going on at first, especially if you don’t already know that the art piece belongs to a card called “Control Magic.” But once you separate the objects from the geometrical shapes, you can piece them together to find the unity in the image. The lines that are shown around the man’s eyes and hands tell the story of the piece. First, you have the lines from his right eye, showing that the dragon has come into his line of sight. There’s a bright gleam in the eye, showing that perhaps there’s some magic behind the pupil. Similarly, there are lines coming from his right wrist that triangulate themselves around the dragon’s head, as though there were a spell being cast and traveling through the air. As these lines naturally move our eye to the right, we see that there are more lines on the left side of the piece, this time arranged more like a box, as though the man has captured the dragon in the palm of his hand.

I want to emphasize the term ‘unity’ because it’s a pretty important concept in more abstract pieces. Abstraction by its very nature takes some of the focus away from real-life forms and places a higher emphasis on idea. Nielsen’s piece shows that “Control Magic” isn’t a spell represented by a physical object like a flame or a lightning bolt, and she conveys that idea with geometrical shapes. Everything in the artwork, whether a real object or a conceptual one, is unified around that central idea.

Okay, with those ideas in mind, let’s move on to your piece.

There are two fairly clear layers to Reign of the Sea. You have Yuna in the foreground, dreaming of an ocean that looks an awful lot like The Great Wave Over Kanagawa, another piece well-known for its use of geometrical designs (hooray for fractals!). In the background, Adalia sits in the center of a series of concentric circles, blowing a stream of water colored like stained glass. I want to kind of unpack what you’ve done with these images because there’s a whole lot of shapes and colors in your picture but not a whole lot going on.

The shape that’s most prevalent in your piece is the circle. It’s an important shape because it’s really the main object that unifies your foreground and your background. The problem is that, in my opinion, it doesn’t do as good a job as it could. You’ve got arcs drawn in Yuna’s face, sort of like how an artist would start out deciding the proportions of the picture. Since your piece uses a geometrical style, it helps to tie into the rest of the image, but the arcs in Yuna’s face are completely separate from the position of the rings around Horsea’s body. The real unifying element is the circle showing off Yuna’s dreams. It’s positioned in a way that I can almost imagine the zoom-in lines running tangent from the dream-circle to the circles around Horsea. If Horsea is part of that dream, then it makes sense that Horsea is showing up inside the ephemeral circles in the image.

So there’s one idea communicated pretty well by your image, which is that Yuna is dreaming of the sea. The thing is, most of that idea is contained in the tiny image positioned inside her head. All the stuff outside of Yuna’s body doesn’t communicate that idea very well. Your use of the circle connects Yuna’s dream with the parts of the image that are focused around Horsea, but the background doesn’t really suggest “ocean” or any other part of what Yuna is dreaming about. The atmosphere is certainly dreamy—it’s made up of objects that either don’t really exist, or that are fantastical in nature. In addition, the stained grass flowing from Horsea’s snout and the stained-glass-like pattern of shapes drawn in the circles in the background and your character’s faces makes the picture look like something that could appear in a church window. It gives the image a spiritual tone, but the contents of the dream don’t really pervade the image.

For example, I have to wonder why there’s a picture of a globe, with its colors inverted, in the top-left of the picture. Or a picture of the night sky in the bottom-left? Upon closer examination, I can see that there are waves tucked away at the very bottom of the night sky, but they are so dark that it really looks like the focus of that part of the image is the sky and stars rather than the sea. I like the idea of enclosing it in the sparkly, colorful stream of stained-glass “water” streaming from Horsea’s snout, and I love the way you used Horsea’s tail to form the moon in the image. It just isn’t a very prominent part of the image, since it’s pushed off in the corner.

Overall, your image is really clean. You were able to work in some shading, even though the image intentionally rather flat. The detail in Yuna’s hair is particularly impressive, though I think you could have pushed the contrast between the light and dark areas even further, particularly on the top of her head.

Grade

While I think your image needs a little more work tying the overall idea together, I think the image itself was really well-drawn and it’s still pretty successful as an abstract piece. For that reason, you pass! Horsea is captured! Now, I’ll have to coordinate with the grader of K’Sariya’s story, so that we can decide on event rewards.

 

@Morru : VeloJello and I have discussed your collab with K'Sariya and we've decided you succeeded! That means you get an extra $20,000 for your troubles! Enjoy!

 

Fantastic curation @Elrond 2.0;! I couldn't have asked for anyone better to review this piece. I agree that the elements here weren't as cohesive and nuanced as I'd like as Nielsen pieces are; admittedly a large part of it was the time crunching to meet the [extended] deadline. I'm glad you enjoyed it, it was pretty fun to make. The globe on the top left is supposed to show a silhouette of Adalia's father, a Kingdra.

Learned a lot from your critique and I'm sure going to be mindful of the things you mentioned the next time I attempt more art in this style (which I most likely will, Nielsen is just sooo inspiring).

I'm claiming Horsea and the bonus $20,000!

 

tfw u didn't see this til now and it's a delicious surprise present

claiming!!!