brush buddies

|˶˙ᵕ˙ )ﾉﾞhello! we started brush-buddies to give advice to fellow artists. this project is inspired by angel ganev's critique videos. we want to give artists a safe space to improve and grow upon their works.

note: we are not professional artists — as in we do not work in the industry and draw for a living.

how to request for advice

send us an ask on tumblr with the following:

your artwork

any reference photos you are using (optional)

what kind of advice you are looking for

redline OK/not OK (whether you're alright with a mod drawing or painting over your artwork to visualize feedback)

if you are unsure of what specific areas (face, shading, etc.) you would like help on, that's OK! we will take a look at your atwork regardless and give help where we can :]

below is a good example of an art request:

note: in order to submit an ask with media attached, you cannot be anonymous. additionally, you cannot request a specific mod to review your art. replies are also not immediate — mods provide advice on their own time!

if you would like your advice to be private — please note so in your request! we will not post your ask, and will instead privately message you our advice

🥹 thank you for sending in our first request! for this piece, i'm going to focus on rendering your hair (since your eyes look awesome already!)

i think your piece feels 'muddy' because the values for your hair are very close to each other. values are the lightness or darkness of your color! if we set your piece to BW, we can observe the values of your piece. when i pick out individual shades in the hair, on their own they are pretty distinctive from each other. however, they are pretty low contrast — and the way you rendered the hair is very subtle! your brush strokes blend into each other a lot — which ends up blending your values in the hair together, which THEN contributes to the 'muddy' feel you are perceiving.

to fix this problem, you're going to want to introduce darker colors for the shadows, and brighter colors for the highlights! i tried to use a brush similar to the one you were using already.

if you take a look at the sphere on the left (which i rendered using the current colors in your piece), it's a bit hard to see where the highlights and shadows clearly are. in comparison, the sphere on the right is much more visible! the sphere on the right uses the current colors in your piece, but with extra shadows and highlights introduced :]

so let's try to apply these principles to your hair!

firstly, when you want to render an object, you want to think about how the light is interacting with the object. in this step, i roughly drew out the shape of the hair! based on the highlight in your eyes, i'm also going to pretend that the light is coming from somewhere above.

i took the darker blue from the sphere on the right, and used that to define some shadows.

then, i added the highlight to the hair! to make it stand out more, i added some more dark colors in some parts of the hair. additionally, your highlights and shadows will be more readable if you draw them with a clear shape in my mind. my highlights here are kind of squiggly and messy, but you can tell that the shadows have nice clear shapes! i also carved into the hair on the left side of the piece to show individual strands.

if you want even more contrast, you can introduce another darker color for the shadows!

key points to keep in mind:

make sure your values are distinct from each other! observing your piece from afar can help you get a feel for how clear cut your values are

consider how the light interacts with the object you're rendering in order to define shadows and highlights

using clear shapes can help make it less muddy!

the way you originally rendered the hair is very nice — because you blend or layer brushstrokes a lot, it has a very light and subtle effect! however, if you're looking for more contrast, you will want to try and blend less in order to make shadows and highlights stand out more :]