Hyatt Hyacinth
alrighty and thank you so much for taking the time to critique me
biggrin First off, it's cool to be doing a crit of trad work. I haven't had the self-confidence to do much colored trad work lately, when it feels safer to do color digitally. You used pen and marker for this, correct? Your pen lines are very clean for the most part, though your economy of line falls apart in some places in the hair and you overlap a bit in the bodice (? I'm bad at women's fashion so that might not be the right name...) area.
I like the way you chose to show the ends of the hair, it makes it appear fringe-y without looking too messy. Though the colors in the hair are nice, I wish you'd shaded it, the collar and the cuffs like you had the rest of the piece, to give them more volume. For the shading on the rest of the piece, the subtle values are nice, and you have a consistent light source, but the amount shaded makes parts of it feel a little flat. Notice how much of the arms you have shaded in--the same width is how much you shaded the dress. since the dress is wider though, it makes it appear as though the light is hitting it head-on instead of from the upper-right, which is how your skin shading makes it appear.
The detail you put into her dress is nice, but the texture comes off differently from how I think you intended it to look. For a frilly look, you have to draw the edge of the folds, where they dip down into the next frill. For examples of what I'm talking about, check out the frills on
these two dresses from the first two results for a google image search of frills. Drawing only the outside border without the inner folds gives it a different look.
In terms of the form of the dress itself, it seems very disjointed. Try drawing the way the form of the dress would look first, and then add the details and decorations on afterward (if you're jumping straight to inking, I recommend sketching it out in pencil before inking in the final lines).
Your proportions are pretty good, but the anatomy itself is off. For instance, your arms are nice and shapely, but they don't seem to have a bone structure underneath them. If you draw a straight line from the middle of the elbow towards where the arm is pointing from that point, you don't end up at the middle of the wrist, for example. That is a problem with both arms. Your shoulders also seem a bit sharp; shoulders generally have very organic looking slopes to them.
The most attention-grabbing figure issue is the breasts. People might judge me for saying this, but well drawn breasts make a big difference in art. I won't go on a long breast tutorial rant here, but I will say that it helps IMMENSELY to look at actual breasts (or pictures of them) to see how they behave when pushed or held in different ways.
Your face could look a little better (i.e. nose lower, lips higher, eyes more even), but the last few tips I'm going to leave you with are more technical. I love working in pen too, but the best part about it is how evident it makes line weight. By making some parts of your lines thicker or thinner, you can imply value and form in the lines themselves before you even color or shade.
Compositionally, it's very bad to have the corners separated from the rest of the piece. In yours, the dress curves up in such a way that the very corners of the page are cut off from the rest of the piece. It would also look better to not crop off the very edges of the dress. Painful cropping is when you crop just the very edge of something, or cut off something at a joint and is best avoided.
Also, a good thing to remember with trad work is that using free photo editing software to increase contrast/saturation can really help a piece stand out after it's been bleached by a scanner or camera.
Your piece is very cute, and the clean lines are great, but you should work on your shading and anatomy.