Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hey. I'm not a member, but I was hoping I could get some help anyway?

I really love this new avatar and thought it merited being made into art. And, I haven't done any non-life drawing for a while, so I needed to shake the rust off. For some reason, it came out looking a lot like the actual Gaian avatar's pose, which is fine. Not intentional, but I can live with that.

But, I dunno. I'm only lukewarm about this (maybe from staring at it too long?) and stuff seems off. I think I could add more interest by altering the facial expression to something NOT DEAD, but I would really, really appreciate another pair of eyes to help me with other stuff.



Things I am concerned about: The placement of the sword. It just seems angled wrong..
Also, the feet - stance, wings, overall believability (does it look like you're looking at a foot and not a really fancy sausage attached to the bottom of her legs? wink ). You know, stuff like that.

Thanks in advance for any comments/crits.

I second what Dr. Valentine said, and just to add on to that, the sword most definitely looks awkward. Like, with how big the sword was, no one would really hold a sword like that and be in that pose and have the facial expression. The pose looks stiff altogether, but I think it would help a lot if you had the sword either a bit over her legs, or at least next to her legs. The sword would look less awkward if it was pointed down, or a bit towards her.

And yeah, you're right about the face. If she looked maybe like she was a bit scared, or pissed off, or really excited, it would make it a lot more interesting. Like something was actually about to happen.

That's a pretty decent jump in quality there. You're right to be concerned about the feet. Right now one leg is shorter than the other, and you'll want to amend that; draw a horizontal line from the bottom of one of the pant legs and you can see that they're not even. So you probably want to work on the subject's left leg, pull down the pant leg for starters.
The larger problem is going to be that foot; the two heels seem to be at drastically different heights, so possibly moving that entire lower leg down to start with might be a good move. From there, you can decide if you need to move the subject's left heel down further, if the heel should be more visible to create better depth via overlapping and if the toes should be a bit larger and have the top less visible to sit more firmly on the 'ground.'

Keep checking your horizontals to determine positioning, knowing that if the person is standing on even ground, there heels will both be at the same level. Same goes for the greaves, and the sandals. When you're done with this piece, you probably want to read up on some perspective, get to know it well, since all character and figure drawing is in fact perspective drawing, you're just drawing more complex anatomy than say, a washing machine.

Overall, there's nothing wrong with doing avi art, just remember that you're better off getting poses from references that aren't your avi. When I first joined Gaia I had fits over the dodgy perspective some of the avi footwear had.

Also, the shoulder things are really graphic and not reading depth very well, so you may want to put a bit more detail into them, and also consider enlarging the right-hand (subject's left) side to help the depth issue or consider shortening the snout on the other.

You did a good save with the sword, and it's working much better with the subject's demeanor. But is a sword that large not going to have a pommel? I'm not as well read on anime blades as some people here, maybe they can make some suggestions on that?