Pretty sure this is my first VeloJello curation? I don't think I'm worthy.
Velo, this is stunning. This is genuinely one of your most spectacular works. You capture these creatures with such wonderful energy, dynamism, and mischief. Their emotive features and energetic poses capture an incredibly fun rivalry, exactly the kind that I’d break out popcorn to sit back and watch. One of the most amazing things about this is that you’ve done it in a way that feels very human, but also very realistic—humans, of course, don’t play like this, and yet I can’t help but relate it to the feeling of two siblings rough-housing as they fight over a coveted, shared object in a way that brings back memories of my own childhood. You’ve literally gotten me to relate on an emotional level with imaginary realistic Pokemon lemurs. I’m baffled.
This’ll mostly be a curation of small details and consistencies—it’s difficult to give anything more as advice on this one. I’ll start first, though, with what you’ve done well and how you’ve done it, and how that informs the score I’m giving. There will be a lot of use of the word “convincingly,” because as I’ve said, you’ve convinced me to relate to primates on a computer screen, and there are tons of elements that you’ve used to make me do it!
The easiest marvel for me, first, is anatomy. You’ve absolutely nailed a realistic portrayal of a Passimian. Passimian is a broad-shouldered primate with slender sides and stomach, with a long, somewhat bushy tail reminiscent of a lemur’s, and you’ve translated this splendidly. I’m not trying to fawn over the muscles of a set of monkeys, but the way you’ve carved the canonically broad, powerful upper arms of these Passimian into realistic forms that portrays their strength is stunning. The curve of its highlights at the top of the jumping Passimian’s upper arm, paired with the taller swath of lighter shading beneath it, solidifies the curved, broad form into space, giving it a realistic and powerful bulk. The strip of darker under shading beneath that is
another wonderful touch of anatomical realism. This bulk in the arms also helps make the torso, while of average size, seem a lot slimmer, as Passimian’s anatomy calls for, but without making it seem unconvincingly thin. You use this same lighting technique to build out the bulks of their snouts.
The only small detail in the anatomy that I can question is the jumping Passimian’s far arm. Passimian’s
default art establishes white fur on the forearm and black fur on the upper arm, the split in those presumably being the elbow. The other arms in Cry Foul! also establish that the white fur ends either just before or past the joint of the elbow. This would mean that we’d see a similar break in fur somewhere on this curved line, which insinuates the curving of a joint. That curved line is also smooth, which caught my attention with the way it contrasts to the nice fur texture you’ve created on the edges of the arm above it. I keep trying to imagine the arm from a different angle to try to see if there’s something I’m missing, but it’s not coming across clearly to me as a viewer.
I also love the way you’ve depicted the feet, especially the falling Passimian’s extended one. You’ve layered the toes convincingly, and the subtlety of the small curved line just beneath the right small toe, separated but connected by the toe’s line that points to it, is such a simplistic but effective way to suggest the balls of the feet. You do a great job of not over-explaining detail, and instead giving just enough to suggest it to our perception in order to let our mind fill in the rest. You do this especially well in the background—the foreground gives us the details we need about their surroundings, giving the background room to fade into simplicity to allow our minds to fill it in on their own. You also do it in subtle textures—the vague hints of grass in the foreground, the subtle stripes on the fruit they battle over.
Your background and foreground are wonderful, and they completely bring the work together. Honestly, I spent a lot of time staring at the Passimian, but I could spend even more time staring at those fronds in the bottom right corner. There’s something so wonderful about the way you’ve used those streaks of light and dark to completely create a front that feels like it’s pulling away from the screen. The way you’ve used them to frame the scene also helps immerse the viewer—their raised angle feels like we’re the ones pushing away the fronds to look in on this energetic spectacle. The rest of your fronds are just as convincing, down to the way they droop beneath the weight of their own leaves. The bamboo trees are another place where you use subtle shading. On the furthest left one that’s in focus, you suggest just enough of the rings and let the rest fade properly into shadow to let our minds fill in the blanks. Your background fades convincingly back because of the way you’ve diluted the colors to the green light as the trunks and leaves go back into the distance. Along with their descending sizes and the ascending placement of their bases on the composition, this helps suggest them going back into space.
I have only a few small critiques on your background and foreground. The critique on the foreground is on the portion at the falling Passimian’s feet. Due to the splash, I get the impression of mud, but I wasn’t completely sure. This is one of those spots where it was a little more difficult for my mind to fill in the gaps of suggestion. The bulk of these creatures make them seem heavy, and canonically they’re about 185lbs. While the slickness of the mud gives the impression of it also being slippery, these Passimian are heavy, and they’re moving fast. At least at the heel’s point of contact, I expect it to be sloughing a rut into the mud, and the splash coming up from that path, and the rut pushing up the mud in the path of the foot as it goes.
The critique on your background comes with a little more of a look into your technique, and how your style as an artist makes use of line in outlining. Almost every part of your foreground has some sort of outline, with varying degrees of subtlety. On sides that face away from the light, like on the left side of the jumping Passimian’s torso and tail, you use darker outlines to emphasize the way they are cast in shadow. On the opposite side of that same figure’s body, on the side that is bathed in the light, you use a dual outlining of a medium-dark and a very light highlight. You use medium-dark lines in the inbetweens, like the line that separates the fruit-holding arms on top of one another. On the edges of the falling Passimian’s white fur, you use a wonderfully subtle dark outline that helps the lighter fur contrast even more sharply on the background. On the far, far foreground, on the leaves that are right up at our vision, you use this black outline instead to separate it from the figures and the rest of the foreground, and to make them more crisp, which works quite effectively.
However, as you go back, you begin to lose this outline--and for good reason. Edges become less defined, and as a device, these things in the background aren’t things you really want us to notice or linger on the details of. The same even goes for the grass in the foreground. You use partially ambiguous strokes to define the grass, all without outlines, even at its closest that we see it. For some reason, though, the grasses in the fading background have these darker, gestural outlines that stick out to me. The horizontal lines at the base of the foremost bamboo trees work fine, as they help define the ridges in the more amalgamous, carpeted levels of the forest floor. The ones that define the vertical grasses, however, are peculiar--you’ve defined these as larger tufts of grass, but grass this large isn’t present in the foreground, and the lovely bent, fronded plants you have in the foreground aren’t silhouetted in these lines.
I’d love to see this grounded greenery defined with equally quick strokes of flat color, like the foreground grass and like the trees around it. Again, this is a small consistency critique--perhaps it’s something you’ve tried and haven’t liked before, but was just something that stylistically jumped out at me that I thought I’d point out. The only other thing is perhaps some sort of darker shading to ground the foreground fronds a little more, as some of their ends seem a bit ambiguous for how near we are to them, but that’s another minute detail.
I love your use of color; everything appropriately takes on a gentle green or yellow tone. The way you shade fur is beautiful! It’s simple but convincingly flowing and fluffy. Overall, I think your lighting is really sophisticated. Shaded areas have a sort of partially-ambiguous light source that feathers shadows until they’re almost unnoticeable, and you’ve captured that well here. Your shading is subtle and at times, defined less by intentional dark marks and more by a lack of highlights. In regards to the lighting, I have only one critique!
You’ve got this lovely effect of dappled light on the falling Passimian’s shoulder. The more rounded and spotted marks gives the effect of some bit of light filtering through the leaves above to cast a very particular splash of sunlight onto its shoulder. You use a similar effect on the leaping Passimian’s outstretched arm, and on the falling Passimian’s tail. However, this effect isn’t anywhere else as far as I can see--the glimmer on the fronded leaves seems like the waxy gloss of the leaves, not necessarily a concentrated dapple, and the floor’s lighter patches are wide swaths. I thought that it might also be just how the light is raised on ruffled patches of fur, but they’re detailed differently than the rest of your fur shading, and it’s also fairly bright and distinct compared to the rest of the shading. I’d suggest dispersing this effect elsewhere if it is streaming sunlight, or making it a bit more clear that it’s doing it in this isolated area for a bit of a “chosen area” effect!
The rest is spectacular. I hold personal, loving vendettas to people who can draw fingers, toes, and feet that well. I also adore the Passimians’ expressions, one of mischief and triumph and the other of shock and dismay! You really did a wonderful job with this, Velo. I trawled my eyes over this longer than I do with most works, and I might as well have taken a magnifying glass to it the entire time to try to find things that you missed. I also looked at an embarrassing amount of lemur and similar primate images trying to find some discrepancy in the way you depicted them. My search history is a mess!
Absolutely lovely. This passes with absolutely soaring colors at
Complex, Passimian captured! I’ll be completely honest--the cohesiveness, creativity, anatomical accuracy, emotion, and story of this entire work would make it a solid Merciless pass from me if this were for cash. Heckin’ great job!!
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