W32Coravint's Attempts at Art [NEW PIECE 20170901]

[Index]
[Cash] Anomaly C-430-29​

This one's for cash, done with two pencils. No sharpening was required. It ties in with a story that will be going up eventually. A Mismagius explores a ruined subway station.

​

 

Coolio! I like ghosts! Marked for curation!

 

Wow! You do have
promising talent! It is definitely a creative idea to put Mismagius in an old, abandoned subway. They're like caves in cities with plenty of life energy to eat. I'm guessing this might qualify as medium or hard. Let's see why:

Pokemon likeness: Looks just like Mismagius; I'm really not seeing many problems there.

Composition: I'm you places the ghost off center, but my eye goes right to the top right corner where that broken sign is. My eye gets kinda lost because things are of every similar value. But otherwise, it is well composed. For medium rank that is fine, but if you want to score in the higher ranks listen up because you can work on shading, value, and perspective. All three of those actually play in to the reading of a work and I think they could have been done better.

Technique: Now in the following sections I don't mean to be harsh, but I do need to point out several things if you want to score higher. I wouldn't be telling you these thinks if I didn't think you were capable or had enough artistic experience to handle it.

Shading + Values: I'm a little confused here. You said that this was an abandoned subway, well based on the way you've shaded it, it looked more like a functional NYC subway station. I loooove the borken down sign but it gets hidden. All of these things would become clearer with more dramatic shading. I'm also not sure about what is your light source, either. Based on the way you lightly shaded in the ghost you're telling me it is the ceiling lights that are lighting the ghost. What would be cooler is to perhaps put some burning gas tanks or something because otherwise you're telling me the station is functional.

Pencil technique: I would recommend not using a mechanical pencil until you can work on layering just a bit more. Since I'm grading you at the medium level, that doesn't matter atm. I do advise you to explore different harness of lead, as well as you can get to darker values SOOO much easier with say an 8B pencil rather than your standard HB or 2B. Use the hard pencils H, 2H, etc. only for small, precise details. Really, it makes a difference.

Also it will be a good idea to take advantage of the pencil's beautiful ability of making darker or lighter marks with just the pressure applied.

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Perspective: I see that you know that objects recede in space and I see that you hashed it out carelessly in your drawing. This really had an impact on your score and kept it firmly out of the complex ranking where perspective is almost needed. (By demanding perspective is a must for representational work). For medium, your perspective is fine, but it is making it very hard to read your drawing.

Remember the horizon line and Vanishing points? I'm sorry, but your drawing has several of both.

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Yeah. There is some semblance with the outermost line but the other lines follow no specific pattern. If you wanted a corrected drawing (and would have bumped you up a rank or two, depending on how you fix up the shading), look below:

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The horizon line is still high, and you work to bring it lower. You'd be surprised that with a lower horizon line that you'll even be able to make more logical sense of the billboard in the background!


Conclusion: You're in a really good spot right now! If you keep at it in no time, you will truly make some good works, but for now you made a work solidly between medium and hard so go and have your 10k!~~ (You can come back and work on it and I will award you the money difference) (52/45)

 

Sweet! The idea with the lighting was initially that the sunlight is shining in through the ceiling through a massive hole, but I guess that wasn't really clear due to the way I shaded the Mismagius. Claiming my 10k!

 

Another one, and this time it's digital. Made in MediBang Paint. This one is also for cash.

Seems like some of the Unown have managed to breach containment. This'll take them a while to clean up.

[Cash] The Lojbanist Unown
"Lerfu" is a Lojban word meaning:
x1 (la'e zo BY/word-bu) is a letter/digit/symbol in alphabet/character-set x2 representing x3.

Proof: Removed the Unown and "LERFU" graffiti, removed the 6 on the building and made the building itself transparent, then wrote my username on the layer just above the background ​

 

Claiming ^
/plays Roswell theme

 

Woops, kept forgetting to do this. Apologies for the delay.

CONCEPT & FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Something strange is afoot in this piece, quickly bringing up such thoughts as “I shouldn’t be here”, or perhaps much later—“Where am I?”

Unown, true enough to their name, are among the most mysterious Pokémon to date, so using them in this scene and having them spell out a seemingly nonsensical word really drives up the ominous feel your piece has, which I’m assuming is what you were going for.

DETAIL, CREATIVITY, & STRUCTURE

This isn’t the most detailed of pieces but I really like most of what you’ve included. I’m immediately drawn to the floating forms of the Unown, and I appreciate you trying to vary their positions. I think having them all look directly at the viewer would have made them more eerie, but the way you have it makes for a more natural, dynamic portrayal.

The wire fence is neatly done and visually pleasing, though eagle-eyed observers might notice it isn’t evenly spaced throughout.
Then there’s the vandalized sign, which I have to say is my favorite part of this piece. The warnings on it reinforce the grim tone established by the fog and the Unown. The graffiti is also a nice touch since it makes the setting feel abandoned and old . . . or maybe that’s just what ¬they want you to think?

I think the building needs the most work; not in terms of detail though since it’s mostly a background element, but the contours could definitely be improved. My first impression of it was that it was some sort of silo secretly doubling as a containment facility for the escaped Unown. I do like that you put a number on it, suggesting that there might be others holding Arceus knows what.

In terms of composition this is a pretty balanced piece. However I think it could benefit from having a few more structures in the background, perhaps only faintly seen because of the fog obscuring everything, but are nevertheless there. Playing around with layer opacity will definitely be useful in that situation.

COLOR CHOICE & SHADING

I really like the dreary earth colors you chose for this, since I think anything too vibrant would detract from the mood this piece has. Still, you managed to avoid the entire piece from being too dull with the red-on-yellow contrast provided by the sign.

The shading is a bit confused, though I see you mostly kept it consistent with the Unown. Having fog really makes shading a challenge since it’s supposed to obstruct your light source in varying places, so using reference photos could really come in handy.

POKÉMON ANATOMY

You missed the nub on top of Unown-U (see below), but other than that you did perfectly, so no problems here.

Spoiler: Unown U

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EFFORT & EXECUTION

As a whole, this piece drives your concept home well enough. There’s room for improvement, but I can tell you’re mindful of detail, so just keep it up! Experiment with tools available to you and don’t shy away from looking up a lot of reference images, especially when shading. With that said, I think I’ll give this piece a score of 40. That qualifies under the Simple Rank, meaning you can claim $5,000.

If you have any questions about this curation or just want to discuss it with me, feel free to PM me here or DM me on Discord!

@W32Coravint;

 

Claiming the 5k. Also, I did not realize the Unown U had a nub on top of it. Now that I think about it, maybe it's an antimemetic body part?

 

[Cash] Unloading Cargo​

This one's done in GIMP. The Chinese characters on the wall translate to "Castelia City Shipping Company".



Aside from the psychic glow on the box, only the 216 web-safe colors were used. I think. This one's for cash as well.

Proof: the car now has no wheels, the main part of the shipping container is gone, there is no ground, and some buildings just ceased to exist

 

Gimp can be tricky to draw in. Claimed.

 

W32 you're known for inventing rather creative systems for yourself and working under tight constraints from developing machines that tell you which move to make in battle to twitch plays urpg in the ffa style machines. Your work illustrates that you are creative and tech savvy and quite frankly takes skill to make a Gimp airbrush look like an airbrush from MS paint. That being said, your drawing really looks like it was done in MS Paint. The only thing that I see that only Gimp can do is the pink glowing stuff around the box. The concept of a psychic type doing the heavy lifting with psychic powers is a bit amusing to me.

Overall Look and Technique:

Your perspective is bananas, I'm sorry. I think you've seen too many memes and such becuase the differing perspectives reads more as a collage rather than a harmonious image. Someone with OCD would not like looking at this image. That being said, it is more consistent that your mismagius piece where the perspective was literally all over the place and I can really see what is happening. I'm going to harp on your perspective because it is a recurrent issue in your works. You have a clear understanding of space, but you seem either too busy or something to pay attention to. If you want the disjointed, feel, make it more disjointed. I'm glad, however, that it is improving.

The box in mid-air should also follow the same laws of perspective despite being at an awkward angle. I think you reasonably accomplished that task. Considering the degree of the rendering of every other object in the drawing, I'm fine with it.

It is clear that you layer and layer as evidenced by other artworks you shared on discord. Doing so eases the pain but it can really get hard to keep track of them to make a coherent image or edit them easily. You have several things working compositionally but the execution of your drawing is rather rudimentary. Using more tools in GIMP would be more visually interesting than just the pixelated brush tool you used. I'm still wondering how you got the airbrush tool to look lie MS paint's. Regardless, there is a reason why GIMP's airbrush tool looks and behaves like an actual airbrush -- it is visually pleasing. While I can be a fan of pixel art, often pixels do not afford the level of detail that artists can use to express whatever they're doing.

You have a clear light source which is nice because it adds depth to the picture. And you tried given the pixel nature of your drawing to make the most out of all of the individual textures: the fuzz on espeon, rough ground, corrugated steel on the truck, dirty concrete parking lot + building. etc. The textures on most of the objects besides Espeon, I'm sorry, conflict with the simplified nature of your drawing. But mostly on the truck.

Your composition is nice. I mean it follows the same basic pattern as your Mismagius artwork--with the protagonist off center either above or, in this case, below it. Try moving espeon behind the sitting box. It might be more interesting. It seems like you couldn't find a right place for the psychic fox. My eye enters the work through the tires and follows the perspective lines through to the bridge in the distance and I move over to the buildings, then I jump down to the chinese characters which move my eyes to the floating box. It have to work to find Espeon and I think its place could be a bit more well considered.

Color Pallette:

Making art in the 256 colors is rather annoying to be honest. I hate color restrictions but I also hate being overwhelmed with color. Putting that restriction on you forced you make this image look like it came out of a 90's console game and is very cartoony. You did what you could with the colors but with the restrictions left you little choices to color in espeon, the car tires, and the buildings in the background realistically. I mean if you look at old video games you can find that the graphic designers managed to create atmospheric perspective with the color restriction, but you seem like you want to do more with the colors at hand. Really go for mixing colors and blending. Computers can do that now without it looking fake or too seamless. I saw you worked into the sky, but more work on the background would help.

Conclusion:

I think you have a solid understanding of space and were hindered by your own challenge. Use the colors that we can see or make some more bad-ass art. Your perspective, while imperfect, is better than before and conveys space MUCH better than your Mismagius drawing. I hope that you will find more information. Your work doesn't have as good rendering to be complex or hard, but is too good to be simple. I'm thinking medium, but your cartoonishness takes away. Knowing that you challenged yourself by completely constraining your color choice you pulled off what you could. You could certainly do more. Don't be afraid to do what the Pointillists (check out Dejeuner Sur La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat) did and use different colors to create optical mixing. 45/45 This work is solidly medium. 10k!

 

Yeah, I'm going to throw out all the restrictions and use a full 16,777,216-color palette with my next piece. Claiming the 10k!

Oh, and to get the MS Paint airbrush effect in GIMP, use the Bristles 03 brush with any size less than ~25px and set your dynamics to correlate Angle with Random. Modify the Spacing to change the density of the pixels.

 

You know how I said I was going to use a 2^24 color palette for my piece? I lied, this one's in 256-color grayscale (because the thing it's based on was in grayscale too)

It's based on the art for a Vocaloid song called Jibeta Travel, by Hinata Electric Works... if that's even eligible for art gallery stuff.

[CASH] [ジベタトラベル]


Copy and paste the title into Google to find the original album art.​

 

Claim! Hi W32, don't think we can grade this since this has nothing to do with pokemon!

ACTUALLY upon further investigating, I do see 2 solosis and 1 bronzor! It works!

 

Ok! I just listened to that song it was in reference to and WOW yeah, new empires, battles across the cosmos, I'm glad you've included plenty of baby psychic pokemon to help illustrate the scale of the subjects that the songs on this album cover.

Often album covers are more focused on promoting the concepts of the songs while still being a flashy, cool piece of advertising material rather than say your typical painting. Paintings aren't looking to advertise so often you don't need a board of directors approving your design. That being said, they still can be intelligently or creatively crafted, but you also have to incorporate things like text, along with whatever you're drawing. It is clear that you were working with the original artwork so you at least could have used the same font and figured out how to place the text yourself. I see that the text in your drawing, however, is drawn and looks rather scratchy and unfinished. The one that I've seen you adapt has fairly sharp, clean, rigid lines, and I would have liked to see that emulated there in both the text and the design in general. I do think you could have spent maybe another half hour tidying your line work a bit as some parts look looser than they should. The inner circle of your Bronzor, in particular, could use some tidying up, as well as the solosis orbs, or the castle/building in the background.

The pokemon you've drawn are clearly three pokemon. However, their designs, especially Bronzor's, looks really rushed. He is super-thin when his official artwork shows him circular. If you were wanting to draw him in perspective, like he normally is, then you should follow the guide from the following picture:



It is a bit super geometrical but you wind up with egg-shaped ellipses with some sides being distorted more than the other.

Your solosis blobs are almost accurate and nicely drawn, but I am a bit upset that all of their details are so close to each other in value. I think they could have benefited from being a little lighter.

If you squeezed bronzor to look like the principal rocket ship in the original license, it isn't clear as I had to look up the original rocket ship. If you distorted his have more, perhaps, or take an artistic license and keep him circular! There isn't anything wrong with that!

The values on the design were meant to highlight the text with them being close to white, and the subjects being a nice variety of light grays and the background completely black. Drawing in black and white is good sometimes if you are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer variety of color that a computer art program affords which is fair. Black and white drawing does help one work on the form without having an added layer of difficulty of the proper usage of color in space. I do suggest choosing a few basic colors in a palette and work your way from there. If you're using GIMP, I think it saves some of the colors you've used and they will be able to blend to make even more stuff!

Since this is a design, there really is no 3-dimensional space to work in and subsequently design elements start to be more important. You still managed to adapt the concept of the album into a pokemon universe, but it is a bit too rushed. The lines, shading, etc., all look rushed compared with the original. Your forms are a bit warped. Overall, with the lack of color, I'll give this a simple rank, which translates to 5k.

 

Yeah, this was a rushed proof of concept to be honest. The font used for the text is specially designed for the video - look at Hinata Electric Works' other songs like ルスバンドライブ, ブリキノダンス and the newly released ムーンウォークフィーバー. I'll try using Inkscape next time I do a Hinata EW parody album cover. (Now to actually learn how to use Inkscape...)

Note: the crown and sun in the bottom left are a King's Rock and a Sun Stone respectively (replacing the crown and scepter from アンダワ), the two Solosis replace the spaceman things from ワープアンドワープ, the Baltoy holding up the caged Heart Scale replaces the things from プラスチックケージ. These three are Hinata EW's previous works before ジベタトラベル.

The only other Hinata EW song you can find on YouTube that I haven't mentioned is スパークガールシンドローム, which is also pretty cool. But there are a lot more producers than just them. (I recommend Nayut alieN as well.)

Vocaloid is my jam by the way, in case you haven't noticed.

Claiming my $5k!

 

Here's more Vocaloid weeb trash - SF-A2 miki as a Pokemon trainer, with a Flareon, Porygon-Z and Joltik.

[Cash] Vocalotrainer SF-A2 miki


I used a MMD model as the base for the trainer.​

 

Speaking of Vocaloid weeb trash, Hinata Electric Works recently released a new song. And did I mention I figured out how to use Inkscape? Enjoy my attempt at a cross between a Baltoy and one of Hinata EW's classic... uh... things.

ヤジロンダンスフロア [Cash]​

 

that is claimed! you're next!

 

Hi Coravint! sorry for the massive delay! Things are picking up in my life which I guess is a good thing for me, but not so much for someone waiting on feedback for their work! You are just working for cash, I see and now working on a robotic form with its (or her) pokemon friends. On a background of your invention. While I like decoration, I do think that abstract backgrounds are a bit disharmonious with the scene like when you see a movie that is badly green-screened. Anyway, on to your crit!

Every character's pose/Group as a whole:
All of your figures grouped as a whole look really separate, like they're posing for a photograph instead of being in natural poses in a carefully composed setting. In fact, there really is no setting to draw off of so it makes me think you were aiming for a design? I guess it is roughly balanced with the figure and a tiny joltik on one side and the two medium sized pokemon on the other but often artists find that having an odd number of subjects is more interesting than even one. Even designers look at how placing bunch of small objects creates a mass of objects that counterbalances another, larger one off to another side. I think if you played more with the scene and the grouping of mons and robots would help it a lot. Your pokemon aren't really interacting with each other in great contrast to your next work. I can't really gleam any information about what makes those pokemon themselves if they're all ignoring each other.

Background (or lack thereof):
Be careful when you choose to eliminate placing your characters in a scene. Placing your characters in abstract backgrounds can sometimes work, but all it does is make us look at the figures more because it tells me that the character is more important than the scene. And when I look at the characters I would expect you would spend the amount of time working on bringing out the finer details of the mons as you would placing them in a background. While it is fine and nearly every portrait photographer eliminates background to highlight the subject, often it is also carefully chosen to bring out colors and such of the person to either illustrate some emotion or to make them look prettier. Your background design - white, army green, and black are simple. I have no idea if you were aware about this but the color of the robot's hair, porygon's body is red, and flareon's fur is red-orange which means that is a near complementary color pair. Your character is wearing orange and blue socks and clothing which is another complementary pair. Basically that means those are two colors on the opposite side of the color wheel, and usually when they interact they tend to contrast more. It works less so with porygon because the red on it is a bit dull as with the background so they blend together as opposed to the bright orange of flareon or your model's hair.

There is no sense of gravity in here as they are walking over the design. I really wish they were in a physical space because otherwise for me to be satisfied with an abstract background is to work on the figures about x3 more or play around with their pose, their positioning and their coloring. That being said, I can still that it is a fun design piece. Anyways, onto the next part: the crit of the individual characters you have drawn. I wanted to get the overall stuff done first because I felt they were more important, but I definitely think you could have slowed down a little more on each of the individual figures as well. While each are clearly recognizable and mostly proportionate to the robot, which I am assuming to be as tall as a tall girl, they do have their own individual quirks that I think you would benefit from hearing them being addressed:

The robot:
Your vocaloid robot is clearly the centerpiece of your drawing. She is the most relate able and the largest object there with the flashy colors in her clothes demanding all attention be brought to her. Porygon is there but is lost due to being relatively dark on the dark letters of your name. Most of the anatomy bull that I can hammer you with doesn't really have to apply since she is man-made and therefore subject to anatomical liberties. I do believe, however, that you took a lot of time to work on her and judging by the overall quality took the most interest in drawing her. Every pokemon looks very rushed in comparison. That being said, your robot is a little strange. You clearly have drawn her as if her body was painted with a metallic/plastic skin color as evidenced but the monochrome shininess and the bug eyes. I'm a little confused as to why her eyes are so big. I know that is the anime style, but they're so big they're bug-like and alien. Her expression is pretty serious and as she holds the pokeball dramatically with her hand, it looks like she is about to catch something or battle. It is hard to read, but I'm guessing they're all looking the same direction, but it is hard to tell. Her fingers are separated out a little oddly; could easily fix that up. I'm a little upset that you didn't carry the shading in her dress all the way down, and that her head's outline goes slightly above her head. Otherwise, good job! You clearly had fun drawing her outfit and pose. I mean her arms are resting awkwardly, but I guess you can defend it by saying she is a robot!

Flareon:
I think of all of the figures I have the most problems with is a your Flareon. Flareon is a fun fire type eeveelution and I think you have the overall done fine, but everything about the eevee looks a bit stretched. I guess it comes down to flareon's natural sense of symmetry and when it is off you start looking at it kinda funny. I think you really dropped the ball on her eyes and her hind legs. They are rather wonky. I do love that you took the time to shade, and get the drawing in, but when people first look at their subject they go straight for the eyes. Animals are no exception. Her neck fur is drawn fin; it looks very fluffy, and I think you could have brought that same level of detail back into her tail.

Joltik:

Of all the pokemon that you have drawn and that I can see minor errors in, this one I think, is the best drawn. Despite its size I do think you could have done a bit more shading and fixed the eyes a little but otherwise good job!

Porygon:
I think it is a little wonky, I'm not going to lie. Porygon-Z is a digital creature which means his body shape is determined from mathematical formulas and computer programming which diminishes the opportunity for it to develop organic shapes like normal, cellular organisms. I do believe in gimp there is an oval-making tool so you can use it if you need to. If an object is geometrical--draw it like that! Some of its shading bleeds out from its outline and other parts looks strange. I think you could have definitely spent some more time working on this as the shading is OK I guess.

Technique:
It is very clear that you have made your outlines obvious. While it is OK if that is your thing, I do believe that keeping your outlines visible makes it painfully obvious that those were sketches and what we're looking at is a cartoon. While that is fine, I do think you could have played with your lines a bit more. Perhaps drawn thicker lines where there is more weight or shadow, etc. Keeping them all the same makes me lose a little interest in looking at your design. I think what is saving it are the large horizontal bars in the background that force me to move along. Big bars can also be lines to a drawing.

I think your technique is improving on the compute. You're starting to get a better sense of design and playing around with brushes of varying sizes and textures. Keep up with playing around trying out new styles or ways of going about whatever artistic problems you run into.

I'm glad you at least made an attempt to shade in the design despite there being no real light source--since you chose to eliminate the background--it makes it feel like you lit your characters on a stage. Some of the shading, I believe, does forget about texture, especially in your model's hair and in flareon's fur. You don't have to put in those ugly texture filters but if you play around with mark making, you will be able to find that you can imitate texture with shading! Shiny objects reflect light in sharp, crisp shadows with areas of complete, white, reflected light while rougher objects ten to disperse the light more evenly. I'm kind of missing their cast shadows but they had to go as soon as you eliminated a tangible background.

Overall:
I think you have presented a risky thing: you eliminated the background to focus on the figures. But in doing so you also took the risk of having everything else more heavily scrutinized. Your pokemon are rather wonky but your robot is rather well drawn in comparison. I think you would benefit more from having a light source in a scene rather than coming up with an arbitrary spotlight to green screen your characters on as it does create a serious disconnect. Your girl is very focused but by eliminating the scene, I can only guess as to what she is doing. So I think with the overall quality of your work I would definitely place it between medium and hard. I can't really give you hard ranking because there are too many little errors that come to light more when you put in an abstract background! So have your 10k! 45/100!