What are the strengths of my art and what should I improve on?

[u/KindDifference1720]

hi! im sam and im a 19 year old artist whos constantly looking to improve and study each day. id love to know thoughts on my strengths and what i should practice/learn more about! atm im studying hands, angles and anatomy at different paces since i like adapting my style.

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[u/idk_what_to_put_lmao]

ur posing is dynamic and u use interesting perspectives but sometimes the rendering feels incomplete or flat

[u/bleu_leaf]

I'd say your strengths lie in expressions and communicating character. I do encourage you to work on it more since it's such a good quality to have, because it makes any artwork gripping.

What you should improve on, I'd say shading and backgrounds are ones that stand out. Your shading seems to be a bit all over the place, and I can see you want to try more complex lighting situations, but don't really know how to. I think learning some theoretical basis of lighting will help you a lot in elevating your characters and getting those dramatic shots.

Then for backgrounds. It's clear you prefer drawing characters and backgrounds are a bit of a struggle, thrown in when you really need them for a scene. In my personal opinion work without a background can be fine, but a good background can help a piece enormously. Characters interacting with something in their environment will always be more interesting than them doing nothing (the girl with the skeleton piece is a good example of this). So try to work on the backgrounds as an active part of the piece, something that deserves the same love and attention to detail as the characters do.

Hope this helps!

[u/SaintLint]

Proper cell shading. You have talent!

[u/EssayCompetitive1417]

I absolutely love the colour contrasts and the way you use colour theory. The shading and highlights are really pretty too. I think you need to work a bit more on hands and anatomy in general. And the poses and dynamics are absolutely amazing!

[u/localanti]

The ears are the wrong shape.

[u/EssayCompetitive1417 → u/localanti]

I think they are elves but I‘m not sure

[u/mnl_cntn]

Rendering is incomplete in these.

Outside of that, I think some of your compositions are great but others are really struggling. I recommend studying movie stills for the everyday scenes and posters or comics for the more stylized single figure images.

[u/weth1l]

You have strong instincts when it comes to appeal. You really need to work on form next: get back to still life drawings of the basic forms for a while, spheres, cylinders, cubes, etc. You're not a beginner, but you're missing that fundamental, which is why a lot of your pieces feel 2D even when you have these fun, ambitious perspectives. This is by far the biggest weakness I see in your works right now, and it's something that would go a very long way with not a whole lot of studying once you start to get it. Once you understand how to rotate the basic forms in a 3D space and render them, building up the human body, or animals, or props, or background elements all becomes a lot easier because the basic forms are what you break anything complex down into, so it's important.

I'd also recommend working on clothing specifically once you have basic forms under your belt: rendering out the forms of clothing folds.