Sharing Some Digital Art *critique please*

[Vasiliki]

Very nice. You definitely have that painting technique down for sure. I'd be curious to toss you into CorelPAINT and see what you can come up with, given the larger variety of textures you can work with. Photoshop is great, but I find unless you import a variety of brushes, you can tend to lack a bit of texture here and there. These look very clean and smooth, which is great for portraits. Other subjects might lose a bit of that 'edge' they'd need.

If you're looking for a critique, I can provide a bit of one. No worries, though, I'm not a harsh one

The only thing I'm feeling as I browse through these is they feel like they lack a bit of contrast. By appearences it looks like you went off photographs for the facial building, which is great. Photos, especially portraits, can really lack contrast sometimes or intentionally are lit to create different 'feelings'. I personally would have loved to see you sneak a bit of contrast color into the shadows, built a bit more highlight/dark along the edges (especially near the 'back' of the photo where you start to get into shadows). Even just cooling off the tone a bit on the face in certain shadowed areas would have been enough to break up a bit of that one-sided color palette.

I can see the variety of skin tones you used, which is great. That's not what I'm critiquing. I just mean I'd love to see the red and flesh tones pop a bit by adding some more 'green' to the shadows. Not straight green, obviously, haha. But a greyed out green instead of just a darker skin tone. It doesn't make sense when you first start playing with it, I know. But shadows are typically the color across from the highlight color on the color wheel. So for red/yellow hues, their shadows would tone into some greens and purples.

Haha. I had to play with making shapes and shadows for a while before I understood what someone was talking about with that. But once you get it, you can really take your work to that next level. We tend to focus so much on color with digital programs that we sometimes can forget a bit about color theory.

Like I said, this isn't a harsh critique. More like something to play around with later if you feel like you want to change it up and try a different style. Nothing wrong with these portraits. You have a beautiful bokah background, very nice levels of depth, softness fading away from the focal points... Nothing I'd tweak here. I'd just love to see how you would approach a more saturated and varied color palette if given the chance, especially with the soft painting style you have here