Thread: [DEC] Snowfall

Ahhhh!! This went for so long unclaimed!! I remember seeing this artwork get put up around Christmas, and thinking to myself “Wow, the standard for art is so high! This is amazing! I wonder if my December art could ever be as pretty!” And now, to find out its gone unclaimed?? A cryin’ shame!
Lets go and get you that secret santa Tauros!

Firstly, lets talk about colour. It’s a wintery scene, and if you reduced this picture to just its palette, without even any forms, I would be able to tell that. The variation of greys in the snow, in the sky, in the icy dark trees, and the fact that even the tauros are desaturated to match the snowy cloudy weather, is very clever! You’ve gone for a slightly less cartoony colour scheme, and it makes the scene seem more realistic. The grey gradients in the sky, and grey-white variations across the background give depth to the picture without being overly colourful. The colour of the tauros’s coat is on the cold side of brown, and it all just matches so nicely with the gunmetal grey kinds of colours in the horns and detailing, while still being true to tauros’s original colours.

Shading! Shading is especially important in snowy scenes (I learnt that while in Antarctica trying to paint. Yeah, theres a million colours of white and grey in snowiness!). You’ve given us mounds of snow, but not so fluffy and even that they’re flat- a smart choice! Shadows are diffuse under the cloudy grey light, on the soft ground, but they’re all in the right places. The tauros don’t seem to be sinking into the snow, nor do they seem to be floating on top of it. Its nice. I guess we could probably see a hoof or two stuck into some of the mounds you’ve painted there, because they all seem to be at an even depth whereas the snow is in wind-driven heaps. That’s a small complaint though, because who knows! Maybe the ground is just bumpy like that underneath the snow and the snow itself is in an even layer!

One extra detail you could have put in would be hoofprints, in the snow. As it is, the picture seems like the tauros have been standing still for some time. That’s cool, since they’re grazing and like, cows aren’t the most active of species, except that the front focus tauros has picked up its hoof. Unless its been standing like that for a very long time, we would probably see a dent in the snow where it has taken its hoof up from.


The anatomy and form of the tauros, I don’t even mind if its not super accurate to the anime versions! You’ve got your own style here, and its more realistic than some of the cartoon depictions. They seem nice and fluffy and full, with that long-haired cow kind of hair around their necks. The horns and face details emerge in a way that seems both natural and mystical at the same time, and I think that’s because you’ve followed the anatomy of actual cows so well. Their face shape, eye placement, and all of their leg/knee/ankle angles are within the realms of believeable.

Their tails are…interesting? Less tufty and soft looking than I thought they might be. It could be because they’re the same grey as the horns, and shaded to give a look like they’re shiny (in a more horn/metallic way) compared to the rest of the hair shading on the body. They don’t seem whip-like as they do on tauros usually, these ones seem thick and ropey, like a bundle of donkey tails. While it might be a more realistic width for an individual tail, the thickness of them seems a little awkward coming out of the front tauros’s butt. The background tauros has a better tail-thickness ratio, but they’re all kinda at strange angles. IDK. When cows defecate I guess their tails do some pretty weird angles, so it isn’t a picture-breaking detail. Its just something to work on if you did some moos again!

Background. I love the background here! I like the rising mountains, I like the way you’ve created layers of interest by having the horizon liens of the mountain outline, then closer hills, then the horizon line on the edge of the snowy field! Even the field itself has depth due to the way theres more detail closer, and futher away blurs together. That, plus the other tauros, just chilling out at different distances! It just seems so comfortable and normal.

Spacing and placement in this artwork is very easy on the eye. The contrast between the dark mountain and the light snowfield draws the eye across the middle of the page, which is exactly where our moos are placed! None of them are too high above or below this central line, and theres a comfortable amount of room at the edge of the picture for all our subjects to not feel squished onto the page. Its almost frame-able, with a consistent area around all the borders with low interest. Our focus subject is not squarely in the middle, because that would be weird, but placed neatly into a third. On the further right area, the background tauros linger. I like your choice to cut one of them off a little, to frame the focus tauros a little better yet give the picture the feeling of that natural uncertainly where the cows aren’t arranged TOO neatly. It’s a lovely lovely landscape. Also, I love the falling snow!!!

So yeah! Overall, you totally reached a hard rank! You’ve used that amazingly creative internal camera to spot them in the wild, and take a photo! Tauros captured!
Belated Merry Christmas!!

Edit: oh Also! Also! It totally matches the December themes!! How can I deny the wonderful weather! You can claim the extra $5k too!