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Deviation Spotlight
- Dec 10, 2000
- United States
- Deviant for 10 years
- She / Her
Hey everybody! I'm just a dweebus who likes mythology and art.
Profile Comments 267
You are awesome.
Hello, I'm here for the OC-Training In-Depth Comment about Flax Karlet.
I start from what I love about your style. You use vivid, bold colours that I find to look luxurious and magical. It make your OC look straightforward who she is: a creature from a mythological realm. I also can see that you keep art-line in a colour relating to the area within it. It's fabulous!
Other thing I particularly enjoy in your entries this round is Flax body. She's chubby but firm at same time, a true lioness. She takes space and stand tall. It must make others respect her at first glance.
Her body language and face expressions are also big advantages. It's easy to get what she feels and I like her for this trait. Sure sometimes it may not be 100% anatomically accurate, but I think the humorous impact of your style is more important and it works pretty well!
Personally I prefer comics to be easier to distinguish objects within panels. I like when characters and items seem to almost pop out of flat screen. If you feel like trying to achieve such impression, please consider two things.
First would be to significantly distinguish weight of art-lines in each plan. Draw characters in foreground with bolder lines and the background in finer lines. The more distant something is, keep its lines lighter.
If there is something extra in first plan, that is not main character or object in a panel, try to blur it. I suppose blurring may also work well for textures in background - the more distant object, the lower level of details.
Another thing that I guess may help distinguish objects in your drawings and make characters look more three dimensional, could be more daring shading. Because your pictures are quite dark (they are saturated but dark), experiment with tints to be more prominent.
I check my shading once in a while hitting keys combination ctrl+win+C, which make all screens display stuff in greyscale. The shading should be efficient in grey, to work in colon. BTW the same test is possible in traditional mediums: one may squint eye-lids or take the art-work to a darker room, to see if shades are efficient.
For my comment to be complete, I'd like to make a remark that you free to ignore if you don't like it. While I think that bold bodytype of Flax looks awesome and make her being a fearful manticore, I miss some more refined tail. Something like lizard tail with curvy shape, getting slightly finer toward the tip or scorpion tail with its segments. Moreover perhaps a stylish lady would like to keep her porcupine's needles pointing one way when she's relax?
Overall, I enjoy your art featuring Flax. You do a great job with beautiful colours of mythological realm and vivid body language and faces. I also admire comic elements of your personal style. Please keep up the good work. 
Thank you for your critique! I will keep everything you said in mind 
I will say one thing though! I know you said that I could ignore this comment, but I do have an explanation for why her tail is the way it is. Manticores historically are very inconsistent with their tail designs. Some have full scorpion tails, some have lion tails with quills on the ends, some have lion-ish tails with scorpion stingers etc. I wanted to try and really combine the two in a way that made biological sense to me, while simultaneously looking aesthetically pleasing to my own eye.
The way that scorpions sting, really relies on the way that the tail is structured. It isn't very realistic for something with a stinger like a scorpion's to be thin and mobile like a regular cat's tail. But at the same time, I wanted to convey the "lion" part of it as best I could. Underneath the fur that you see on Flax's tail, it is very close to a regular scorpion tail. That's why it doesn't move much, because it isn't very flexible. I added the fur to it to so that it still looked like a combination of a lion and a scorpion; even though it would only really move like a scorpion tail. With some exceptions: it is still more flexible than a scorpion tail but (for example) it can't bend backwards. Kind of like a human spine.
In addition, I did want them to look rather large and unwieldy (like a club or a mace). They can really whack people with their tails and knock them off their feet if in the correct position. All while leaving their opponent with a face full of quills. 
I see.
The most important thing is if your drawing look the way you like it to look. So no need to explain anyone your intention (though I appreciate you cared to tell me what's on your mind)
Good luck with your artistic endavours! 
Hello there,
I am here for the critique task for OC-Training.
I would like to start off by saying that I am amazed at your eye for color theory. You really see what works best together and all of your pieces are so colorful but complimentary as well😊Your backgrounds are also very detailed and well thought out. The composition for your art is well done too. Nothing seems out of place or like it needs to be moved. I always struggle with composition in background pieces, so I really admire seeing how you do what you do in that regard.
As for improvements you could make to your artwork, I think your character art would benefit from some further study of anatomy, specifically facial anatomy. The foreheads seem a little small as does the back of the skull. Consider studying how the skull under the face is formed. Perhaps if you loved the hairline higher on the head while adding more skull from behind their ears to the top of their heads it may improve that. Along with facial anatomy I see sometimes that you draw jaws with a thick chin then curve in and go out again when you near the ear. Instead of that you may want to try and draw a straighter line from just below the ear to the chin. Keep up the good work!
Lastly, I’d like to talk about your character for this round. I think it’s super cool that you have created a manticore character, I don’t see many of those. And I think you have done a great job drawing Flax and telling us about her character and story. One of the most difficult things I find in OC-Training is getting across who my character truly is, I feel I never quite depict them correctly, but I don’t see you struggling with this and I have really enjoyed reading and seeing lots of stuff about Lady Karlet. I am really curious as to how old she is in human years…? Lol. Overall, I have really enjoyed browsing through your gallery and reading about your OC! I hope that you continue to create a beautiful story and I wish you luck!
Thank you so much for your critique! I've been really trying to improve my backgrounds this time around so I'm glad that it seems to be paying off!
I definitely agree with the head/forehead thing. It's something I've always struggled with. I used to draw heads far too large because I usually draw the face first and then the head around it; and so I ended developing this weird style of drawing the forehead too small to try and make the head smaller without erasing the face I drew 😅. While Flax in particular I tried to make her head shape more resemble cat (or lion) but my regular knowledge of anatomy kind of makes things look off when I try to alter/stylize it. But it's good to know that it isn't just me and it's definitely something I need to work on. I've been planning to try and study realistic anatomy more for a while now, and I need to get on that 
.
You're right about the jaws too, and I know you're specifically talking about Fortuna; she's the most egregious. To be honest, it stemmed from me trying to make all my characters look more unique from each other and I still haven't really changed her design... I need to revisit her once I get a better grasp on head shapes.
To answer your question: Flax (at least, the Flax I have submitted to OC-Training) would be 76 in human years. That would be around 33 in manticore years. She eventually lives to be around 300 years old (which is around 130 in manticore years).
Thanks for the fav!