Hello, I drew my OC taking a little break from reading (which can be very exhausting sometimes). I’m generally very happy with how the picture turned out and I’m especially proud of how the pillows in the bottom right, the window corner in the top left and her face came out. I’m also very happy with the sketch itself. However, the picture does have some serious issues that I only really noticed while rendering, and at that point I didn’t have the energy (or the knowledge of how exactly) to fix them.

I added a picture of my final Artwork, the sketch, the main references for the body, and then the whole reference board I relied on.

One problem is that the picture doesn’t really have a clear focal point. Almost everything is rendered with a similar level of detail. I felt that my sketch was too ambitious to paint without lineart, so I made a pretty clean one to rely on. But when I work with lineart I feel like I need to treat every part of the drawing equally, which makes it hard to guide the viewer’s eye to one specific spot. Because of that the painting also ended up taking a very long time to finish, around 14 hours. I’m not necessarily unhappy about the time spent because I felt like I learned a lot from solving problems and rendering many things that I usually rush through, but in the long run it probably isn’t very efficient to approach every painting like that.

Another issue are the colors. I don’t think the rendering of individual elements failed completely (but please feel free to correct me on that), however the overall image feels very saturated and there are many different colors competing with each other. It doesn’t really follow a clear color scheme or harmony. I struggled with how to deal with that because I generally like bright and saturated colors and I wanted the scene to be set in bright daylight. Because of that I couldn’t simply make everything dark or desaturated except for the light source. At the same time the character herself has a blue and gold theme and the environment she is in should appear somewhat noble and rich, which also pushed me toward bright and colorful choices. I could have given her different clothing, but I’m wondering if there are also more theoretical ways to approach problems like this.

These are the main issues I noticed myself, but if you think there are problems with her body, anatomy, lighting or anything else please feel free to point them out. Any advice or critique would be very welcome.

Taking a break