I think you got the shape pretty nicely done. I would probably say the edges doesn't have much variations. The shadow needs to be tighter/sharper when it's closer to the apple. Also the edge of the apple seems to be uniformly sharp, to a point it almost looks like the apple is pasted on top. Try adding a bit stronger reflections of those yellow towards the edge of the apple and it will show as "in context" a bit more. keep up the great work!

Oh hi hi! This is a interesting combination/remix! I think you captured the feature nicely, people should be able to tell that's the elements if they know what you are up to. I don't actually know much about the style choice of yours, I think I do see this kind of more or less free-form look from time to time, but I don't really know what's the incentive behind such stylistic choice? Is it something you learned from someone?

I went and checked Jeff's website and wow I loved those group portraits. They showed a lot of personalities and tension between those people. The idea of which I have never really considered in the designs of my paintings. Maybe it's a good idea to think about it.

I can see those individual ones just from the thumbnail! You have a really good value and color relationship in them. Shapes are bit off than the original pieces but I think this is very well done!

This is looking great!

Hey, @quizzy! I see what you’re going through, and I totally agree with @Yiming Wu - it’s a matter of shifting the mindset about how the work should be done. As Yiming says, a longer piece is almost never done in one sit, so splitting the process into several sessions can be a great idea. Start noticing how your own process works - when you notice you lose focus and the work isn’t flowing well anymore, that can be a good moment to take a break. But that doesn’t mean the work is finished, and that’s fine - after a while (minutes, hours, even days or weeks), it’s good to come back to it with fresh eyes and a rested mind to try to see more clearly what could be improved - then do another work session, then take more breaks as needed, and so on. That’s how most professionals do it. Along with that, try observing how you can break the process down into stages. For example: 1) PREPARATION - Usually, preparation work can come first: develop the idea, draw thumbnails to figure out the composition, research visual reference, maybe do some color studies or separate sketches for specific elements that will be in the piece. 2) ROUGH - Then, based on the thumbnails, doing a larger initial rough sketch might be a good following step. For me, this is usually done very intuitively and loosely, in a way that helps me materialize the idea as best as I can without having to worry too much about techniques or “correctness” just yet. 3) TIE-DOWN - After the rough sketch is done, I find it helpful to do another more careful sketch pass on top, and, this time, it’s all about making adjustments so it looks “technically right”. I give the piece a more analytical eye and try to apply all the techniques I know of to see how I can improve it. In other words, I’ll go over the whole piece again and re-draw it with the specific goal of fixing mistakes, making it better and getting the construction and composition as solid as I can.  4) FINISH - Once you’re happy with how the more careful sketch turned out, you can then start to put into practice your finishing/polishing process - and this could mean different things depending on the style and technique, but since you’re working with painting, it often means rendering. Rendering is usually the longest stage in a painting and, at least in my experience, it can take up to at least half the amount of total hours you’ll put into the piece, or sometimes even more. With some practice, these things combined might help you get to that mindset shift and even start to plan you art pieces as projects, not just sketches. Hope this helps. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, just let me know. Best of luck!

I've been starting to deal with a lot of the same problems. A lot of my focus has been on black and white, or grey scale, pencils and inks. Recently for commissions I've been doing a lot of colour work. I quickly ran into the same problems where my composition worked great in the ink stage, but started to become really shakey with the colours. I've definitely started making the shift to designing my pieces with the colours in mind. A necessary lesson to learn, even for pencillers/inkers because someone's probably going to have to colour it. I'll see if I can find some links, but I read a lot of stuff about perceived brightness and the LAB colour spaces.

Humm I think you could just change the way you think how a piece is done. Do some more "realism" stuff (whatever that means)... Try to get a photo study to as close to the original as possible, if you are impatient after an hour, just do an hour, and get back and do another hour on top of it at the later of the day or the next day. because each time you get back to it you find mistakes and stuff, you can easily fix them. What kind of medium do yo use? If you are using watercolor then probably that's not very good for working too much. Gouache, acrylic or painting digitally could allow you to work over top of existing stuff until you get it right.

Hi @Yiming Wu thank you for this valuable feedback! We are always looking for ways to improve.

You've done a great job! I like how you did all the green-yellow hues, a lot bolder than I can manage. Looks like that the aspect ratio of these two images are not quite the same? yours appears to be a bit stretched vertically? also notice the river bank and the path down below, the shape isn't quite there. To me I feel the feeling of "brighter light" is not as much in your study, maybe it's lack of the hue shift towards a bit yellow, especially in the water and the sky line where the atmosphere could scatter light and a lot of times it will shift a bit.

That's quite interesting. In a few years time it should generate more coherent details rather than some noise in those high frequency areas. I'm looking forward to the technology

Here is some sketches of structure on painting. I am not used to go any further because I focus on mayor decisions practice. So, what would you say I could improve till this point? It can be on anything you see related with showing form, it is what I focused on here - including lighting

Man you are good! Like the skill of yours definitely apply to many things you want to do in commercial art! "zero experience"? Nah you have much more than that. Albeit maybe not much experience in working as an artist, you definitely got the skill that the job needed. I'm an engineer student, I lean my art stuff all by my own (which I kinda wish I have a few more other friends to go along XD). I don't actually think I'll be working in art field because it's really different from creating for oneself and I don't have the mind set yet to allow me working effectively in a job situation. I recognize the snow ball fight picture, I think it's from a proko challenge? :D

I think you did really well on the overall weight of the image and also edge control, so there's nothing really problematic in composition. (Unless you have some reference images we could look at and see where you are headed, then it's easier to spot problems) If I must say what can be improved, I think it would be the background city, especially those inside the arch, it's too busy there and lack of separation with the arch, so it appears to be a bit muddled. Otherwise I'd say good job!

Looks really neat! The pic appears to be a little blurry tho, I think might be some grease on the camera lens? Or maybe you also painted a little bloomy effect? Because around the arm it kinda have that sort of separation, I believe it's the green color of the underpaint? I like this. You also got nice detail distribution. Do you have a reference photo or maybe describe what kind of direction you are headed?

That's quite an elaborate process! What I found in my experience is that doing very tight lines first may eventually become limiting and make it rather hard to fix stuff if something is slightly off, however that also resulted in my paintings often have less details than I intended because I painted everything over, and by the time I finished no sketch is visible XD. Here like the center line of the chest is a bit weird (too much to the left?), And I think that can be traced back to the initial sketch. On digital I think a bit liquify could do the trick but I just find it rather weird to adjust afterwards, it also smudges sharper textures IMO. Overall still nice work!

Yeah exactly... It's quite dumb... Flickr and DeviantArt show full aspect ratio which is more pleasant. One thing though... on web it's actually a bit hard to display the correct aspect ratio for all images and put them so they fill up the horizontal space for each row. It will need a script to specify calculated sizes for all images and when the client window changes size it's gonna need rearranging etc... It's not like there are no existing solutions but I think the devs on artstation are just too lazy to implement that :/ I think the backend of them is wordpress, that might introduce some unnecessary complications but whatever. They could do it so much better.

This is painted from a reference photo right? Because of the depth of field and everything... To me the problem may be the final still looks a bit "smudgy"? Especially around the wing and the leg on the bottom left. From seeing the original size, the sharpest sharp edges are probably still not sharp enough, To me it probably need to be "pixel sharp" kind of sharp, like the hair on the chest and head. What size is the canvas? Because due to pixel anti aliasing, you probably need to go way bigger on the canvas in order to get a very sharp feature. Like those hair, you probably can't get a very clear definition of them because it's already in the subpixel scale. The camera could get away with that it's because it's already like "downscaling photons onto predefined pixels", like you zooming out on a very large piece with clear edge, it still looks sharp even with anti alias, but you can't really achieve that with pixel-level brush. Also, you can use a brush that doesn't have smooth edges at all, so the border will almost be like a pixel art (This also require you to have a generous canvas size). For me if I want to paint a "photo esque" image, I probably need to go much bigger than actual image size need, to allow details to be painted in and not to be smudged. Try 10000px wide and that hair should show quite nicely. Also, this brings the benefit of you being able to emphasize any shape by surround it with a sharper contour or something. They look stylish and it helps to reduce the smudginess when scaled back. From the white shape on the middle body there and the contact area to the yellow and black shapes, it doesn't look sharp, but a reference photo could definitely help in such situation. The light /dark shapes overall on the whole image looks very good now.