Hey Hugo - thanks for sharing! I think this is a very well focused and curated porfolio. Would easily catch the attention of anyone hiring for layout/background work. Nice! My main comment is that I think you could work on pushing the lighting, to help service the focal point. Specifically, I think these are being hampered a bit by refusing to lose too much information in shadow. I think you'd benefit from letting your shadows eat up large chunks of information, but then hyper-focus that in the light instead! Paul Felix's work is really testament to the power of this. Here's a quick Google search I just did that brought up a lot of good results: https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+felix+pencil+art&rlz=1C1CHBD_enCA852CA852&sxsrf=AOaemvLTlmvK7N4MFX8adQ5gjT1jjXXffg:1631321272963&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwin4PSn2fXyAhUBFVkFHV0gDX4Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1344&bih=759 Notice how he's really lumping light and shadow shapes together into clear families. And about 99% of the time, the information is targeted toward the light family (as our eyes are used to seeking out light for information; that is, we don't look to the darks for information primarily.) So doing that in your work plays to already-existing human tendencies, and can make your art stronger. You can try this in basically every image you've shared here. As a specific example, the palm leaves in the first one. Instead of showing the viewer the contours of each leaf like that, try clumping the shadowed leaves into more subtle areas of lost & found shapes. But the leaves that are catching light - those are the ones that need to be kept sharp! Give it a try - I think it'll really help your stuff! Marco

Hi Joy, Thanks for posting! I can already see the hard work you've been putting into your art. It's paying off! I like the direct nature of your question. I think I can take that on: The fundamental that most needs work is gesture. These poses appear quite stiff, which is a bit of a shame because the color and rendering are for the most part upbeat and fun. Gesture - or the pose itself - is maybe the most fundamental of all things when doing character art, and what I'm seeing here feels like parts of the body being posed without regard to how other parts of the body react in tandem. For example, the cowboy/pirate guy sitting cross-legged under the lamplight. The way that leg is bending looks very uncomfortable. It looks more like you forced the leg to be there, rather than breaking down how the body has to move to achieve that pose. Because gesture (IMO) is even more fundamental than anatomy, if the gesture is off, you then can't add the correct anatomy to it. Another example of that is the pink-haired girl seen from the back view. Her head does not connect properly to her neck in that image (I can still tell, even though the neck itself is hidden,) but it's not an anatomy problem: it's a gesture problem first. I think the best thing you can do right now is grab a pencil, or pen, and a sketchbook (an electronic device will work too), and go outside, find the nearest bench, and sketch people going about their day! Real life is full of so many varied gestures, and because the people are on the move, you will be forced to really think about how you can visualize someone's pose after they've passed by, and how you can jot down the appropriate marks to capture it. It's different than working from photo ref, because it engages your brain more. With a photo, the information is always there, stagnant, available at any time. From life, you have to develop a system of priority that you can reliably use when catching the briefest glimpse of somebody. That type of stuff really has helped me, along with many, many students I've seen develop over the years. Give it a try! As for what you can fix over time: I think your staging/composition is already looking fun, but the more you do, the more you'll get more subtle with your design elements, and how everything in the frame interacts to deliver the story. Think of composition as how you bring together every single other fundamental. So, in a way, the more you improve things like gesture, the more composition will reveal itself to you. This, though, can definitely develop over time, whereas with gesture I think there are things to do that'll help improve your stuff immediately! Good luck! Marco

Thanks for posting, Carissa! Scrolling through your stuff, I think there's a lot of appeal here. I definitely see a stronger application of line in these designs than color. Not that your color is bad or anything, but for the most part (particularly with the character pieces) I'm not entirely sure the color is adding to the presentation. In fact, it almost detracts - as when a viewer (or a hiring studio) sees color, I think there's a tendency to assume the person is interested in painting. But if one of your goals is to do character work, I would try a few pages/spreads where you eliminate color and only show the line work, or at the most the lines with a touch of grayscale/marker value work. I'm reminded of Jin Kim's work, how it's 90% line, but sometimes he'll spice it up by adding a quick value pass. It's so strong (obviously mostly because he's a master artist) but also because it guides you into his strengths and doesn't put anything else forth. If you google 'Jin Kim Art' you'll see several examples. As for the environment stuff: this is the classic portfolio problem. Do you show characters AND environments to a studio, and risk confusing people as to which department you belong in? (It's a lot easier to hire people when their portfolio clearly shows what role they're interested in!) Or do you bank on the jack-of-all-trades thing, which may better appeal to smaller studios that may indeed have you wearing different hats? For the first...10 years of my career, I did the former. I ONLY showed studios my environment work, even though I did also enjoy characters. That always worked for me. As far as a critique goes, your environment stuff (at least, the two main pieces I see here) are at risk of being too heavy on the light:shadow ratio. I'd say these are 80% light, 20% shadow. It's a bit of a compositional risk to do that, as it takes away from a good sense of staging. Check out a real great layout artist like Armand Serrano - who uses very simple tones to group things into big areas of light and shadow, which help serve the focal point. That's what I'm not getting as strongly in these environment pieces: a clear focal point. I think you do have them ready to go - for example, the dock in the lower piece could be a fantastic focal point in that picture, but you haven't used the lighting to bolster it and make it clear. I'd try a lighting pass on that where the trees on the left get grouped into shadow, along with the shadow patterns they'd throw on the ground. Then from there emerges the dock, into a strong contrasting light. Give it a try! I hope some of this is applicable and makes sense to you - keep it up! Marco