Critique Arena Journal
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WIP for my superhero character sheet. I'm not much into the modern-day pop culture superhero genre. imho stories from fantasy and mythology are more interesting and fascinating to me, and as far as I'm concerned the gods and demons from mythology were the superhero OGs before the term "superhero" became a thing. They certainly check the box of having super-human powers (though whether they always use it to do "good" is another question).
This character is inspired by bodhisattva Manjusri, one of the well-known bodhisattvas (awakened beings who hold off from attaining buddha-hood to fulfill their vow to deliver all beings from suffering) in various Buddhist traditions and one of the four great bodhisattvas in the Chinese one.
Rough initial sketches and text layout.
Initial colours and some finished rendering. Going for fantasy semi-realism.
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@JQ Wow! Your artwork is spectacular!
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@Maureen-Henry-Artist Thanks very much!
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It would probably have been better if I had another day to look at this with fresh/non-tired eyes and do more touch-ups/value-tweaking, but I'm out of time and will have to call this done.
Overall I am a weird mixed of satisfied yet unsatisfied with this piece. I jumped into it not really thinking too much about the complexity, and was just happy to be able to paint in a different style after doing so much children's book-ish work recently. After that it proved to be a trial of patience rendering the details (though always satisfying when done!), and then not being quite happy with the fact that it did not turn out as "painterly" as I would have liked, and that I didn't manage to nail the right values and right amount of contrast at the start - kind of feel like I've abused overlay/dodge layers, and spent more time layering and tweaking values then I should have needed to working digitally. I did decide to challenge myself lighting-wise though (dawn-ish, dusk-ish, moonlight) and think it turned out decently.
I've practised starting photo study pieces with 3-value paintings first to think more in a painterly/sculpting way vs flatting a line drawing (eg. https://tanjunqi.art/portfolio/studies), but it's clearly going to take more study and practice before I figure out how to smoothly incorporate that into my process, especially for more complex pieces and when drawing from imagination.
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Fresh eyes now make me really dislike the piece for being too flat and "digital", so I had to play around with Krita 5's wet impasto brush bundle. Should have tried it out sooner...
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@JQ even more stunning after the update!
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@ArtMelC Thank you! ^^
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A last-minute submission since I wasn't actually planning to participate this month. But a relatively simple scene struck me as I was working on my book project, so I decided to just do a quick one, and try messing around with Krita's watercolor brushes again.
The workflow is still not as intuitive (certainly not like traditional watercolors) but I guess the end result is reasonable.
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@JQ I love it sometimes those last minute ideas are the best!
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@Asyas_illos thank you! Glad you like it
