crits wanted for painting

Hi Brett. Good concept! If light comes from left, shadows shoud fall right. 

I trully recomend you to go to this course https://cgcookie.com/course/lighting-and-values-2 

Sometimes its tedious to attend tecnical stuff but its essential to understand it for getting good stuff.

Keep going. Waiting to see your final work!

Cool character, it's got a very interesting vibe with the pipe. I love the concept. The main thing that stuck out to me is the lighting on the piece - it's inconsistent with the shading on the character. The similar use of color throughout the entire character makes it a little difficult for me to read the character's form. It might be interesting to play around with warm/cool color contrast to create more depth. 

First I have to make you compliments for your work and your attempt to get feedback for it. Not everybody does that. So here comes my feedback.

I really do like your character. You managed to transport a certain mood to your figure. So this is pretty believable. 

I would like to see more detailed parts. Some aspects of your character are completely undefined and I can´t figure out, what they are supposed to be. Take his weapon (or stick) for example or his red beard. Even if you just indicate form or texture it would benefit your character concept a lot. Since it is a character concept peace every aspect of your turtle needs to be clear to the viewer.

And as the others mentioned before you should learn more about values and light. I would recommend you to take your painting and redo it just with gray values. After that you can apply color to it. 

Hello, and welcome to the community!

There's going to be a fair amount of critiquing up ahead, but don't worry, I'll try to be as helpful as I can.

• You've got a nice style so far, but maybe a bit loose right now.  Since this is a WIP, I'm not too worried about it being very loose.
• You're also using whites to get tints and blacks to get shades, and that's okay.  You're still learning.  However, what happens when you apply that to hue and saturation is it makes everything feel flat, a little... lifeless, perhaps?  Take a look at the Color Course, especially section 4 where it talks about hue shifting.  Powerful juju hue shifting is.
• I like your colors.  They're nice.  I'm horrible at picking out color schemes, though, but things feel somewhat harmonious.  Can't really describe why, though.
• Now, for the thing you're most concerned about: shadows.  Shadows will always point in the opposite direction of the light source.  Think about it.  What's happening when a form is in front of a light?  The form is blocking some of that light, right?  Set up a scene, take your hand, or random items, and place them under a 1 point light source like a lamp.  Turn on the lamp and turn off all the other lights.  What's happening?  What can you observe how light is interacting with the objects?  Move the objects closer to the light.  What happens?  Move them farther.  What happens?  Move them up from the surface.  What happens then?  Move them closer to a surface.  Experiment.  Draw from life.  Really observe what is happening there.  There's a really great book called Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney that will take you through all possible lighting scenarios as well as dig into a bit of the science why light interacts with the objects in the way it does.  It's grounded in traditional art, but the theories behind it are still applicable to everything.

sorry to bump, but how do I change my name?