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howdy! You were asking about the decline on this piece for concept world- you already got the two sentence version from one of the other admins, but here's a slightly more in depth critique on this piece and some things to work on I see in your gallery in general- hopefully should give you a better idea of where to focus your efforts:
First off, it looks like you've got a pretty good base to build on, looking at your traditional work. Its really important as you get started into digital art that you not forget what you learned in traditional, and carry it over-I still do a lot of traditional work just to keep lessons like always using the simplest tools that I can, and thinking before I make a mark, fresh in my mind. The issues I see in this piece are partly things to work on in general, and partly things specific to digital painting.
As Thran said, its a bit messy, but thats pretty vague, so I'll start off by clarifying a little:
What he means by that, in a nutshell, is that the piece needs to be polished more. You're halfway to a really cool image here, you just need to put some more time into it, because there are some stages left to go in the painting process. I speak from experience when I say its a whole new world when you go from traditional drawing to digital painting, so its expected if some of this is new to you.
Here's what you need to polish in this piece:
The water has very harsh edged color, bordering on cel shading. While its better to have harsh color than muddy color, you can dramatically up the realism if you give a lot of these patches a hard leading edge and a smooth, blended trailing edge. Just grab the smudge tool and carefully blend those into a clean gradient, just like if you were blending fingerpaint. You can also do a very subtle transparent wash or two over the water to reduce the contrast and make the creature stand out more from the water and sky. There's a knack to knowing how much is too much on blending and contrast, but you want to make sure that background details and interior surfaces in general don't have too many hard edges that distract from the real forms at the same time that they don't look like blobby messes- texture is good, but too much texture is just noise.
For individual forms, however, clean edges and well defined forms are the name of the game- get in there with a simple round brush and get rid of stray brush marks and sharpen up the color changes between objects. Avoid the crutch of outlining when you can, and instead try to get in the habit of using things like atmospheric haze, dropshadows, secondary lighting, and highlights to define your forms. Think of shading in terms of wrapping the light and shadow around the object like you were hatch-shading, and it becomes obvious with a little practice where to blend and where to leave a hard edge. Practice using the lasso tool and you'll be rewarded for your efforts. Its up there with the paintbrush and smudge tools in terms of usefulness, because it lets you create smooth gradients using large soft brushes, and you can paint up to and over the edge of the form without risk of destroying your edges. It has other more advanced uses you'll discover as you play with it, too.
After you polish the read and clean up your edges, the last thing to look into is what you call the specularity pass, something we pencil guys tend to have a hard time wrapping our heads around. The specularity pass is basically where you paint in the parts that are shiny, wet, reflective, or glow-y, using pale colors and the occasional tiny patch of white over top of your painted forms. Mastering this stage is essentially one of the vital differences between drawing and painting- everything we don't draw or only lightly shade when working in pencil on white paper, has to be added back in manually when you paint the same thing. For example, a few tiny dabs of white and some careful soft shading can be all it takes to make a well-painted base like the tenticle in the foreground look realisticly wet and slimy. For me it helps to think of drawing in white on colored paper, and I did exactly that to learn this part- first traditionally, then digitally.
And lastly, the best bits of advice I can give on making the transition from tradtional to digital: #1)Ditch any notion about certain things being cheating, most things that the old guard traditional artists criticize digital artists for are things they do themselves in a different way. Just do what works. But: #2 don't get caught up in fancy brushes and filters, either. The only thing really need is a simple round brush, the rest just let you make funny shapes and noise faster; useful when you've learned how to control them perfectly, but until then its just more stuff to have to clean up. Start with the plain round brush, and slowly branch out into a few others like the wedges or chalk brushes as you master that one. Most of my paintings are done with about 12 brushes, something like 6 of which are variants on our friend the plain round brush. Really good artists tend to use even fewer than that. Everybody has that one super-fancy smoke brush they swear by or a brush that makes leaves for them with a couple of taps, but their default brushes are almost always super-simple round or wedge brushes- simple is better.
Hope that all helps!
First off, it looks like you've got a pretty good base to build on, looking at your traditional work. Its really important as you get started into digital art that you not forget what you learned in traditional, and carry it over-I still do a lot of traditional work just to keep lessons like always using the simplest tools that I can, and thinking before I make a mark, fresh in my mind. The issues I see in this piece are partly things to work on in general, and partly things specific to digital painting.
As Thran said, its a bit messy, but thats pretty vague, so I'll start off by clarifying a little:
What he means by that, in a nutshell, is that the piece needs to be polished more. You're halfway to a really cool image here, you just need to put some more time into it, because there are some stages left to go in the painting process. I speak from experience when I say its a whole new world when you go from traditional drawing to digital painting, so its expected if some of this is new to you.
Here's what you need to polish in this piece:
The water has very harsh edged color, bordering on cel shading. While its better to have harsh color than muddy color, you can dramatically up the realism if you give a lot of these patches a hard leading edge and a smooth, blended trailing edge. Just grab the smudge tool and carefully blend those into a clean gradient, just like if you were blending fingerpaint. You can also do a very subtle transparent wash or two over the water to reduce the contrast and make the creature stand out more from the water and sky. There's a knack to knowing how much is too much on blending and contrast, but you want to make sure that background details and interior surfaces in general don't have too many hard edges that distract from the real forms at the same time that they don't look like blobby messes- texture is good, but too much texture is just noise.
For individual forms, however, clean edges and well defined forms are the name of the game- get in there with a simple round brush and get rid of stray brush marks and sharpen up the color changes between objects. Avoid the crutch of outlining when you can, and instead try to get in the habit of using things like atmospheric haze, dropshadows, secondary lighting, and highlights to define your forms. Think of shading in terms of wrapping the light and shadow around the object like you were hatch-shading, and it becomes obvious with a little practice where to blend and where to leave a hard edge. Practice using the lasso tool and you'll be rewarded for your efforts. Its up there with the paintbrush and smudge tools in terms of usefulness, because it lets you create smooth gradients using large soft brushes, and you can paint up to and over the edge of the form without risk of destroying your edges. It has other more advanced uses you'll discover as you play with it, too.
After you polish the read and clean up your edges, the last thing to look into is what you call the specularity pass, something we pencil guys tend to have a hard time wrapping our heads around. The specularity pass is basically where you paint in the parts that are shiny, wet, reflective, or glow-y, using pale colors and the occasional tiny patch of white over top of your painted forms. Mastering this stage is essentially one of the vital differences between drawing and painting- everything we don't draw or only lightly shade when working in pencil on white paper, has to be added back in manually when you paint the same thing. For example, a few tiny dabs of white and some careful soft shading can be all it takes to make a well-painted base like the tenticle in the foreground look realisticly wet and slimy. For me it helps to think of drawing in white on colored paper, and I did exactly that to learn this part- first traditionally, then digitally.
And lastly, the best bits of advice I can give on making the transition from tradtional to digital: #1)Ditch any notion about certain things being cheating, most things that the old guard traditional artists criticize digital artists for are things they do themselves in a different way. Just do what works. But: #2 don't get caught up in fancy brushes and filters, either. The only thing really need is a simple round brush, the rest just let you make funny shapes and noise faster; useful when you've learned how to control them perfectly, but until then its just more stuff to have to clean up. Start with the plain round brush, and slowly branch out into a few others like the wedges or chalk brushes as you master that one. Most of my paintings are done with about 12 brushes, something like 6 of which are variants on our friend the plain round brush. Really good artists tend to use even fewer than that. Everybody has that one super-fancy smoke brush they swear by or a brush that makes leaves for them with a couple of taps, but their default brushes are almost always super-simple round or wedge brushes- simple is better.
Hope that all helps!