FUMBLED - nnnv ➡ Nyphielia

#nnnvgarden #artwork-review

Planted on

Last Tended on

This artwork is a Poster commission (character + relating elements + graphic design) and it suffered from all the problem I listed in Garden/Roadblock#Weakness of Poster Commission

The goods

First let's talk about what I like:

The most interesting thing in the art direction is the zigzag motifs.
- The zigzag outer frames interact nicely with the background and subject matter, cropping out the farthest details while hiding under the foreground details.
The graphic rendering style:
- Some light and shadow is stylized to simple shapes, painted with the shapes of a brush stroke with minimal modifications. Over-rendering of a shape would destroy the original energy of the stroke.
- Maybe it's because of time constraint, but the distribution of details in this artwork is just right: focusing on the important stuffs and glossing over other details.
Hard technical skills are evident in the final result. Aside from that, I also obtained some soft skills, though invisible but very important:
- layer management: setting name, color coding, and a layer system
- more confidence in lasso selection
- adjusting my expectation for future schedule

A few weeks have passed and I think I can give some level-headed critiques to my own art:

The art direction and graphic design is a little inconsistent:
- the 2 panels in the bottom left side don't really match
- the zigzag motif should be emphasized more!
The empty space in the lower portion of the background is a bit awkward. The spacing of the elements feels too samey.
At first, I doubted my ability to draw this piece because it has been a long time since I last drew anything with perspective and I wasn't going to accept a commission with 3 characters. As a result, while the final piece is very satisfactory (8 out of 10 for me), the schedule and planning of this artwork leave much to be desired.
- Order of tasks is the biggest hurdle. Because I knew this was a big commission, I initially allocated a lot of time for it. Unfortunately, the combination of Hofstadter's law and Parkinson's law destroy my schedule and I was left running to catch up with every tasks' deadlines. And yes, I missed a lot of milestones and was very depressed because of it.
- Balancing the details level across the whole composition is especially difficult: how much rendering is enough? is one character more detailed than the others? is the foreground popping out too much? are the objects on the table too messy?