Void I

Hey Si,

Story
It's not clear what's going on. Is she raptured? Is she dancing? Why are her eyes closed? What are the balls of faint light? Why is there a black strip across her legs? (On my monitor, there's barely any seeable detail in the background -- I can kinda tell there are some swooshy things if I look at it from an angle, but it basically looks all black.)


Light
If a figure is in a completely back environment, that means no ambient light can get to the shadows and so they would pitch black. Shadows are only lit up when there's ambient light bounced into them (so outside that's commonly the sky, and inside that's commonly walls, ceiling etc. -- in space, shadows are completely black because no light can get to them). So here, either there's gotta be some secondary light, or you need to get dramatic with those shadows.

Another thing is that it's not clear what the light source is, or how it's lighting the figure. It must be a very large light source because the shadows are so soft. (Small light sources like the sun or a flashgun are hard, large light sources like an overcast sky or a softbox are soft. Hence you hardly see any shadows during a cloudy day.) Think carefully about your shadow edges, whether you want them soft or hard. This thread on edges has some great information about it.

Also, if the light was coming from the upper-left corner, wouldn't the leg on the right not be lit up like that? Or is that being lit up by some other light? And why is there light near the contour of her body on her left arm (our right)? Surely that would if anything be in occlusion shadow. The photographer in me is trying to make sense of the scene but doesn't get it. Have you tried using refs for the lighting? I think often the lighting is actually the hardest part to get right (and the part that gives the most shape and 3D-ness).

I'm not sure if soft shading works well with lineart pieces. My instinct is that cell shading works better if you include lineart, because lineart+soft shading introduces a confusion of whether it's supposed to look flat or 3D.


Colour
It seems quite saturated and -- waaaaaitaminute. Are you using the Dodge and Burn tool to make your shadows and highlights? If so you should switch to colour picking for the shadow instead.

There are a couple issues with using dodge and burn for shading:

- They tend to do funny things with the saturation. Here, the highlights look super saturated, and the shadows look desaturated.

- The hue also doesn't look right unless you colour-pick -- here, the highlights are going into pink, and the shadows are going towards blue.

- Since they affect certain tones selectively (i.e. if you have Burn set to shadows, it'll make the shadows darker and ignore the highlights and midtones), it won't make realistic shading because it will shade it unevenly. So here, the white embroidery on the right side is almost the same shade as the one on the left side, which makes it look as if it's glowing because it should be in shadow like the rest of that part.

- Unless you're careful, burn can make things look dirty.

Generally speaking, if you use black to make shadows (both in digital and traditional painting), it causes things to look dirty. Black does weird things to hue, so for example if you add it to yellow, instead of making a nice dark yellow, it makes a more olive green colour. [link]


Structure
What kind of guides do you use for the face? (And did you have a reference for that particular angle? Looks hard.) It might be useful to learn Loomis head construction. The basic thing, though, is learning perspective and specifically heads in perspective. (This pack of tut files might help.)

If you show me the initial guides and sketch process you go through, I might be able to give more useful comments.


Hope this helps!


(NOTE: I always give 3 stars for everything in Critiques because I don't think DA's star rating system is useful or makes sense.)