Still Life

Pokémon: Darumaka
Difficulty: Medium
Medium: Colored Pencils!
Proof: In the pudding! (One day I'm going to draw a picture of pudding and put my signature in there. Then everyone will laugh.)
[On DeviantArt] - If you're not a curator but you've got a comment.

 

Claaaim.

 

@Elrond 2.0;

Still Life Curation

Form

Wow, what a great setting you have set up. The roles the characters play in the piece are really clear and entertaining. The devious (or not so much, maybe just hungry?) Darumaka is very evident from its actions, stealing that banana that the artist was trying to paint. The overall feeling is great. Anatony-wise, the only thing I can't tell is if the three ovals across its front are there or not. For one, the arms are in the way, but another is that the Darumaka is really small.

In fact, the size is the only thing I'm not really thrilled about simply because it's just hard to see. The picture sort of hinges on this Pokemon, since its the focal point and main action, but because of the small size, the emphasis is sort of taken off of it. My eye isn't really drawn to the mon first (although the light on it does help that).

Normally, Darumaka are around two feet tall—although this isn't absolute because creatures are rarely uniform. It does sort of muddle how high the mon and table are, though. The mon looks like it might come up to about the artist's knee. I think that next time I would like to see the mon just a little more visible. You showed it performing this great action that added so much story to the piece, so we definitely don't want importance taken away from it just because it's hard to see.

The artist's expression is also very great. He's got that perfect surprise/startle look, mixed with the realization that the missing banana is definitely going to complicate his painting. You get mad props for drawing an actual person too—people are so difficult for me, personally, so I know the kind of work that has to go into it. It came across pretty well.

Technique

I love color pencil. There's something about them that just gives a softer, pleasing look. That being said, it's definitely difficult to use them, so I appreciate your liberal use of color here, especially because you paid a lot of attention to light and shadow. On the whole, your coloring looks great. There are just a couple places were you can tell you colored in a different direction—particularly on the left side wall, where there are both vertical and horizontal lines that stick out. I think those areas could've been blended just a bit more, gone over with strokes.

Colored pencils are sort of like crayons where you have to be careful about the direction the color goes on. If it's not uniform, it's usually very visible until its gone over and over even more. Overall, it didn't happen often. Sometimes to avoid this, I go over an area in a circular motion instead of back and forth lines, which sort of blends the pencil as I go. Of course, doing it so lightly means that I really have to add layers on for darker colors, but it tends to smooth it out a little better. Maybe something like that would work here.

The shadows here are really great too, especially behind the Darumaka with that nice, sharp darkness and the left side edge of the table. There's some really nice contrast there. There are a couple of odd shadows, though. The outline around the artist's legs is sort of jarring, as well as the completely colored in space between the canvas leg and the person. Connected to that is the bowl with the fruit. The light for that picture is on the right side, which you show on the bowl in the canvas. However, the apple seems to show the direct opposite of that, since the right side is dark and the left side has the highlight (although this could possibly be explained away in that this artist is maybe still in-training and isn't perfect yet).

The glow from the light high up on the wall is really great, especially as it starts darker and concentrated but thins out and lightens as it fans outward. The spot on the right wall is a little odd though—where is so much concentrated light coming from? There's already a glow around the light itself, and it doesn't seem to stretch as far to the wall. That dark oval just seems a bit out of place and too bright.

I was a little confused about the light on the ground as well. The other light sources appear to be more candle-like (at least the one on the table), but it's hard to tell if that's the case for the one on the ground. Instead of the cirlce glow, the one on the ground has more of a flashlight beam, and that seems out of place/not consistent with the other one. The light beam is used well to light up the Darumaka, but it just doesn't seem like it's that sort of light. The shadow behind it is also a little odd, perhaps being too sharp and defined.

Also randomly, why is there no light source behind the artist/around the rest of the room? It seems to be night or at least in a place where there isn't a lot of natural light in the room—how does he see what he's doing?

Background

I really, really like your background here. This is exactly the type of thing I want to see in artwork. This tells a great story without needing any words, yet we still get exactly what's happening here. The amount of detail you put in, like the individual fruits, shadows, expressions, all show that a good deal of time and effort went into this piece, and that just makes me even more appreciative of it.

I'm sort of left wondering where the artist's painting tools are, though. The picture sort of implies that the artist perhaps looked away for just a second to find that his banana had moved (since the banana is half painted). That, and if he had taken a break and was starting again, why would the lights already be on (especially if they're candles). This is a minor thing, but I was still wondering.

I think also that maybe the canvas is a little too big compared to what's going on (especially in the case of the Pokemon being so tiny). There's a bit of unused space on the left, upper left, and on the bottom of the piece (although the top does establish that light, and it's pretty close to the top of the canvas). Maybe trimming the image would bring everything a little tighter and get rid of some of that unused space. Sometimes blank space can be a good thing, but since the Darumaka is already smaller, I think the extra room blankness just isolates that Pokemon even more. Since I know you take physical pictures of your work, after uploading it somewhere, it's possible to crop in say paint or another program, just to give it that finishing touch.

Result

Spoiler

A lot of great work into this, although I do wish the Pokemon was a little bigger so we could see it better. Nevertheless, you told a great story with the art, and a lot of the extra details and technique were solid. I'm giving this a 45/45 which means Darumaka is captured!