Swimming with Eels

[MashPotato]

Hello!  Wow, it's been a while since I posted something in the CL
Anyway, here's a painting I've started of a mermaid swimming with eels; nothing particularly spectacular, I was just in the mood to do something hi-res (TFE is a demanding mistress (or would that be master?  anyway )).  I know it's very early, but all criticism is appreciated
Thanks!

Notes:
-that pink smudge in the background is her farther arm
-background colour will be changed to a more darker, bluish-purple to pink tone

[skitzo]

I actually really like this style of drawing.
Just one thing... Where is her left arm, is it beside her or did you just forget to put it in? 
Was this just a "i'm bored so I will draw something" kind of thing or is this going to be appearing in your next game/film? j/w 

[Gilbert]

-that pink smudge in the background is her farther arm

[Dualnames]

Took me a year to find her father's arm.. wouldn't have noticed it otherwise. Anyway it's cool needs a little(little that is) more work. Example her hand ends up unxcpectedly on the edge. And the everything on her foreground needs more contrast and some things to make it cooler. Not that it's not perfect. But said you wanted to reach that level, you can. 9/10...Almost there.

[ildu]

Looks great, Mash . Now isn't hi-res so much more fun to do than that crummy old pixel art ?

Issues (mostly compositional):
- The top of the head/hair has a slight tangent with the tail. Since the face is the focus, you should curve the tail a little lower.
- Since it's  a very dynamic piece, I would vary the direction of motion on different parts, as if all the parts were moving while she swims. This mostly for the farther fin (or what is it called, a gill?), which could be longer, curve less, and underlap the tail.
- Same thing for the hair. The three individual strands seem to follow very much the same direction. I would curve the highest one a lot to better overlap the tail, and lower the lowest one to make it more dynamic and to distinguish the strands of hair from each other better.
- The eels could be a lot darker in the final version, like they are in real life.

Yup, looks very groovy. I yearn to see the final version .

[miguel]

Ildu said most of what I wanted to say but in my opinion this are only details and (as mentioned before) givven critic because you want to excell on graphics.
You can make a good piece of computer art with that screen of yours, just keep going.
I ask again, is it a still/intro screen or will it be in game?

Ildu: hi-res is cool, but try to animate Mash's mermaid!!!

Fantastic work MashPotato!

[ThreeOhFour]

Ildu: hi-res is cool, but try to animate Mash's mermaid!!!

Who needs animation when you can convey this much motion with a still image?

As usual your work excels. I look forward to this one being finished .

[MashPotato]

Thanks for all the nice comments, everyone (heehee, but don't bash pixel art! )  And to answer a question asked: this is just me feeling like painting, this isn't for a game.
Using your suggestions, I've updated the layout a bit (colours will be tweaked after):

I noticed after that the hair might be twisting in wrong direction
Further suggestions welcome!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I really like your color choice here and the general shape is very pleasing.  The one thing that drew my attention (other than the hair) was her arm:





I've marked the approximate distance from elbow to shoulder and elbow to forearm, as well as wrist to knuckles.  I realize she isn't human, but it's pretty clear you're going for humanoid features with the upper torso, and the forearm length and length from wrist to knuckle seem a bit overlong to me.  Reducing those distances slightly might look better, unless you specifically wanted her forearm and hand to look stretched, in which case ignore me!  My edit kind of mangles the graceful curve you established for her hand but it should get the idea across.

Great stuff.

[MashPotato]

Thanks ProgZ, the arm was indeed intended to be exaggerated, but it was still a bit overly long, so I've shortened it a bit I'll be changing the curve a bit from what it is now

[MashPotato]

Hopefully approaching the end now, but crits would be great
I'm thinking the purple of the skin might be a tad too saturated compared to the rest of the picture, but am undecided about that.  I also tried using a different brush to add some texture to the tail just as a test, so it's still a little messy at the moment


All comments appreciated

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Looks great, maybe a bit drab in the range of colors, but that could be intentional with the whole underwater thing.  Very polished regardless!

[MashPotato]

Thanks .  You could be right about the drab colours... I like saturated colours myself, but lately I seem to be using a lot of desaturation--I'll try punching it up a bit

[ildu]

Groovalicious, Mash ! The compo looks a lot better and the hair is fantabulous.

Still some issues for me (from minor to major):

- The eels could be a lot blacker. Eel skin is also a kind of texture that receives a lot of specular highlights (as is the mermaid tail) and is generally glossy, so you might want to take more advantage of that.

- The yellow eyes are a bit off-putting. I think it's a good idea, and it mostly works for the mermaid eyes, but it looks weird on the eels. I suggest making the yellow a bit redder.

- The back arm looked a lot better, positioned as it was in the sketch. Now it's almost completely covered and idly sitting there doing nothing, whereas earlier it was very much part of the motion.

- The purple skin does indeed look a little more saturated than the rest. Instead of lowering it, I'd bring up the tail a bit.

- Finally, and this is my main gripe, I don't think the background fits at all. To me, the image looks like the mermaid has stopped after a spurt of swimming, to look (and point) at something. So her lower body is still in that curve as well as her hair, but her upper body is clearly arched back to stop the motion. If she was in full swim, I'd expect her torso to follow the same curve as the tail, with the arms on her sides and the head arched to look forward. If that were the case, you could expect to have a very busy whirly background, but to me it's not the case. So I naturally expect a calm slightly more detailed background with maybe a few small whirls. Also, the background could be bluer in tone, to give a little more range to the image .

Keep in mind that when it comes to nitpicking a near-finished piece, it's very personal, so I could be completely wrong here . You know I loves you anywhos.

[MashPotato]

Haha, I loves ya too, Ildu
Thanks very much for the crit, you raise some good points .  I tried to address them:

-the major thing was the background... I was hoping to get across the feeling of motion, but your interpretation was more accurate as to what I actually had.  To try to give a sense of an upward spiral, I tried fading the back end of the tail into the distance (it's a bit messy, and there's still a halo).  Does this work better, or is the background still off-putting?

-arm position: the old position was an awkward one... it was at just the position that it would just barely show and would be difficult to interpret plus break the curves of her body.  When I tried to put it back, the composition seemed to become too heavy toward the left .  The new arm position (which looks extremely bad right now, and is just there to get the idea of the new layout across) will hopefully lead the eye in continuation with the spiral instead of back to the left.  The outward arm might have to be tucked in closer to the body now as well, but I haven't tried it yet
EDIT: looking at it again, I'm not sure about the new position.  I think I need something moving toward the right, but this might be too much...
EDIT2: right, I'm really not liking it.  Back to the drawing board

-I took out the eels for now, and they might not return--they seemed to break the flow a bit.  I don't think eels swim at high speeds anyway

-I bumped up the saturation a bit, but will probably continue adjusting as I go.  Added some more blue to the water

-I forgot about the eyes!  I like the yellow, but I'll try toning them down a bit to see how it looks




--------------------------------------------

EDIT3: Added back the eels, and also put in an extra one... hopefully it looks better now

[Play_Pretend]

She's beeeaaauuuutiful.  Although I just watched Mary Shelley's Frankenstein yesterday, so the eels are freaking me out.

[loominous]

Great character as always!

What I'd tinker with is the overall impression.

If you look at the original in a small size



then there's no real focal point to me, and the part that sticks out most is the lower left dark tail area, which I assume isn't meant as the main attractor. It gives a bland quality that doesn't do the character justice at all.

The tricky thing is that this is easily missed if you look at the image in full size, as we start looking at the details, and this overall impression is lost, though felt.


There are a couple of ways that you could use to boost the focus, here are three of them:

(sloppy edits to convey the difference, not to be seen as representative end result)


I) Adding more light to the parts you want to dominate:



I painted in some extra light on the areas that I are think are the most interesting to make them dominate by valuecontrast. Since I didn't merely up the contrast, it will just gently boost that area, without leading to a harsher look.

(I know you know this mash - just a clarification as I often see this in other's work: if your image lacks focus, increasing the overall contrast with a contrast tool isn't the solution! You need to selectively increase and decrease the dominance of areas via value contrast, colour contrast etc)


II) Making the other areas less contrasty:



This, to me, is a very neglected way to get focus, which is a shame. Instead of just piling up contrast to get things to pop, you reduce it instead, but only in the areas you deem least important.


III) Surrounding the object with light:



This makes the silhouette pop, though if it's really bright, and you want to make it realistic, you'll have to add a bunch of light wrapping around the subject which softens up the edges, in which turn reduces the contrast.

It can often give an angel like look which is neat if that happens to fit.


Here they all are in smaller sizes, to give the overall impression:



-

I think each have their own merits.

One thing that II) does is increase the atmosphere - as in the density of particles in the environment scattering the light - think fog - making things harder to see at a distance (as the further away, the more particles exist between you and the subject that scatters the light).

It has several effects: makes it more moody, makes things look like they belong together (blend) more and also provides depth.

In this case, where you want to make it look like she s swimming, it's probably good to rather overdo the atmosphere than vice versa, as otherwise it's easy to lose the sense of water. (the fact that I pushed the environment towards green doesn't help with that though, but it contrasts against her red hair, making that area pop further)

To avoid turning this into an essay, I'll stop here, though there's tons more to say about these things.

Anyway, great job!

PS. Oh, and regarding the body saturation: I think it's mostly about the shadow area, which very blue colour seems unwarranted and sticks out. The environment looks like a less saturated version of her lit up skin area, so that blue tint seems to come out of nowhere.

Edit: Just want to point out that just because the blue comes out of nowhere doesn't mean I'm saying it has to be removed. If it looks good, it looks good.

[MashPotato]

As always, your comments have helped il-loom-inate the way--thank you
In my previous edit I was going toward increasing the atmosphere, so I continued with that.  I increased the light hitting her face (I changed from purple because it seemed to be fading too much).  I think the atmosphere can still be pushed up a bit

(I know you know this mash - just a clarification as I often see this in other's work: if your image lacks focus, increasing the overall contrast with a contrast tool isn't the solution! You need to selectively increase and decrease the dominance of areas via value contrast, colour contrast etc)

When it comes to me knowing things, assume NOTHING   While I did know this in theory, it's something I often end up doing anyway




The eel skin remains sort of light... when I made them dark, I think they commanded too much attention.  I'll keep fiddling with it ... and darn it, I forgot about the eyes again!

I'll keep going on this track... thanks again for all the comments/crit everyone, hopefully I'll be able to finish this shortly

[Ryan Timothy B]

The image looks amazing, the only thing that bothers me is her finger.  She looks as though she's asking where the mayonnaise is, "Excuse me sir, can you help me?". lol    Other than that, it's quite 'fantabulous'.

[MashPotato]

Heehee, perhaps she's asking for some barbecue sauce for those eels

It's not massively different, but here's the final image unless there's more to fix (crits still welcome)
Perhaps it's just a matter of me getting used to it, but in the end I think I'm okay with the new hand position...