These look fantastic!

Tim it’s absolutely great, your value range is super my friend

Jesus Christ that's good, that simplification of shadow on the hair and the underside of the breast is goddamn great (also love the slight indication on the knee!)

First off, the second version is a huge improvement! Not sure if you were only looking for feedback on the colors, but I also wanted to mention something about the composition (though it's also related to color!). If your main idea from this is a fairy and elf fighting over teeth, you need to make sure that's *super* clear. Otherwise the viewer will form their own idea of what's going on, which can make the picture confusing. A good way to check if a composition is clear is to shrink it way down and "read" what it looks like is going on. If it still reads when it's small like what you meant it to, the composition is working well. I can tell you that my first read was that they were playing some kind of board game. Here's what I could tell as a viewer: - Their gestures and expressions make it clear they're really competing. - I can make out a piece in the elf's hand, though I can't tell it's a tooth. - I can make out that there's a table. Here's what I had trouble with: - I can't really read what's on the table (the jaws). Even zoomed in it's hard to understand. - The wings don't read clearly as wings. But there's enough pieces there to put together to form a story: a human and and elf are playing a board game together and they're really competitive (their expressions are really great, btw!). This overall read influenced my whole experience of this piece. I was like "Oh, they're clearly playing a game. But what's the game? That's an odd board—kinda 3D. Are they putting pieces onto the weird board somehow? Or is the elf making a move of some sort? Ohhhhhhh, they're *jaws*! Wait, what's going on?". It wasn't until I went back and read the text of your post that I understood they were supposed to be fighting over teeth. What's happening is that the jaws aren't really recognizable objects, plus they're close to the same color as the mat under them. You can put anything down there you want, and make it any color / value you want. Some questions you can ask yourself: - Do you need two jaws? Is it important to what you're trying to get across that there's more than one? - Does it have to be jaws? Is there something else that would make sense and possible be easier to read? - Whether you keep the jaws or not, is there a way you can give the object a clear, readable silhouette? Are there different angles or colors for the object or what's around it that would help things read better? Hope this helps!

Hey Alex, I like your painting, the drawing seems pretty solid and everything looks pretty dimensional. One thing I noticed is that you are missing some color variation. For example, light is hitting the fairies blue shirt, but, there isn't any blue bounced light in the shadows under his chin. Light is hitting the warm table, and yet non of that is being bounced into the green elf. What happens when we lack these bounced colors, is that our characters look like stickers placed on the background. Color harmony goes out the window, and nothing looks like it really is sitting in the space. I hope this is helpful to you and makes sense :)

Nice work! There's some nice structure in the face. One quick piece of feedback: check the tilts on the mouth compared to the rest of the face. Also, if it's important for the camera lens to read as a camera lens, you might consider moving it so it's not as covered up. But if it's just a design element it can be more ambiguous.

There are others here who know anatomy much better than me so they can correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my understanding of spine flexibility: Cervical spine: limited flexibility, with most movement coming at the axis & atlas Thoracic spine: very little flexibility, because of the ribcage Lumbar spine: the most flexible part Sacral spine / sacrum: no movement Also, keep in mind that from the side, the thoracic spine will be almost all the way to the back. In your second piece posted, it's too much towards the middle.

I see below that you mostly use Photoshop. If you haven't tried the mixer brush yet, I highly recommend it. If you tweak the settings, you can get it so it doesn't put any color down, but just mixes the colors below and adds texture. You can do it on a separate layer, which lets you play around without fear of messing things up. When I use an approach like this, it lets me worry less about the brushes I'm using up front, and lets me really experiment and have fun.

Here's my submission for the challenge! I really love portraits and i try to keep a "traditional" feel even if most of my work is digital. Thanks so much for all you did Marco & Proko's team ♥

Very cool, Marco!

Nice work, Thomas! Are you looking for feedback on anything in particular?

Really gorgeous, Marco! Only critiques are that some of the structure of the nose around the nostrils/ball of nose seems a bit weird, and there's a shadow shape on the forehead that doesn't make sense.

Generally what you're looking for in skin color is a low-chroma orange. Depending on the person, it will swing a little towards red or yellow and up or down slightly in chroma, but will generally be low-chroma orange. This is true even for darker skin colors. One of the first things to watch for is distinguishing highlights from form lights. Things can be really confusing when you can't tell if a light area is a highlight or a form light. This is one of the main challenges when working from photos—it can be hard to tell what's a highlight. From life it's easy—you just move a bit, and if the light moves with you, it's a highlight. In highlights, the chroma will drop even lower (assuming a white or whiteish light). Highlights usually have a core area that's lighter than the other parts and closer to the color of the light, and a darker transition area that's closer to the value and hue of the object. The chroma of this transition highlight will be higher than the core highlight, but lower than the chroma of the object. The next thing to look for is higher chroma in the lights—but *only with form lights*. Highlights lose chroma as they get lighter. For form lights, more light = more chroma. So, as the form turns away from the light, it will lose chroma slightly as it also loses value. The shadow areas will be even lower chroma. So, the light-most-facing plane (LMFP) will be the highest chroma, and the form shadow will be the lowest chroma (starting at the terminator). Capturing the diminishing of chroma along with the diminishing of light can make things look real and full of light. A good trick is that the area of the form light that is most facing to the light (the light-most-facing plane or LMFP) will usually be right near the highlight. It'll be on the side furthest from the viewer. This will be the highest chroma, but darker in value than the highlight. You ultimately end up with a hierarchy that looks like this: - Light-most-facing plane = highest chroma, third-highest value - Core highlight = lowest chroma, highest value - Transition highlight = second-lowest chroma, second highest value - Form shadow = third-lowest chroma, lowest value I attached some diagrams and a paintover to hopefully help illustrate

This piece has that "how did they do that" magic. Amazing textures!!!

Hi Natali! I've been trying out a new way of giving feedback using an online whiteboarding app. I hope it's helpful and not too overwhelming. You can check it out here: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOzUFsDQ=/

Awesome Tim! I still need to watch those videos you sent me. I have them on my todo list. My daily art, video production and work has been taking up all my time as late. Love the painting! Keep posting these I'm learning from them so much as I'm starting my own digital journey. Love the value, color and texture!.

This is nice Tim, I really like the texture. That's what I need to do is add some cool texture brushes to my standard photoshop brushes. It makes the skin look more alive. Good work :)

Some more nice work from you, and I continue to see improvement! One thing I'm noticing in both pieces is some hue shifts in the lights that don't seem to align with any light source. Overall, it makes it unclear to me as the viewer what the lighting situation is. Can you describe the lighting situation you were going for?