Need help/feedback

  • Have been working on this illustration that I would like to put on my portfolio.. but something seems off..
    Something doesn’t look like it’s in place.. any inputs on how to improve this one?
    It’s intended to illustrate

    Children book, illustration,

  • 0FD8B697-2BCE-4F14-9CC9-566FB31A721B.jpeg

  • @Rekha-Salin-0 I'd say the composition is unbalanced, the two characters pull the weight too much to the right. I think it would improve by moving at least the central character more to the left.

    I would try to not use such dark black for the contours of the eyes, so that it is less "in your face" and more in line with the rest of the colours. Maybe experiment with dark shades of the skin colour of the characters rather than pure black?

  • Hi @Rekha-Salin-0, do you have somewhere I can see more of your work so I can get an understanding of the style you're going for? I think understanding you're style might better help me get a grasp of what you're going for in your illustrations, so I can give a clean, fair, and applicable as possible response to this piece. The closest thing I can compare your style to is 'Charlie and Lola'.

  • If you draw through on the girl's left leg, her knee will be poking out the front of her pants. Also may be better not to cover her face with cake. Adjust it so her face shows.

  • Hi @Rekha-Salin-0, I think there are several issues with your piece. I do not want my critique to come across as harsh, but I feel like these are very simple tips that can really push your art in the right direction.

    1. Textures.

    Right off the bat, I can tell that you are experimenting with a variety of different layer effects and brushes and it's not at all executed well. There are some objects here and there that have some decent textures, but you also have flat-shaded objects that make your piece look jarring and inconsistent. You have a texture for the walls, the cake, and the vase at the end table, but the girl carrying the cake, her brother, everything on the table and the floor are all pretty flat looking and it throws everything completely off.


    I don't agree with the textures you've chosen for the hair. Why do they have such a lower opacity and sort of blurry? It's really distracting.

    1. Composition

    I also wanted to add to the comments @txels and @Kim-Hunter made. The image feels like it's sort of oddly cropped. The boy is pushed way too far to the right, and it feels really weird that we can hardly see portions of his body. I agree with what @txels says about the eyes, because there are no other outlines on the characters or the background except their faces. What you could do is like what they said and use a similar color to their face to outline features and maybe just get rid of the black outline and just have a flat plain white sclera.

    What you could also do is something similar to what I mentioned earlier about 'Charlie and Lola'.


    The backgrounds are patterned and textured, while the main character have outlines and are less detailed (to a degree). If you want to keep the outlines, you should give the character's entire body a black outline so they can be distinguished from their backgrounds. That way, you can justify the flat shading and lack of texture that's present everywhere else.

    1. Anatomy and Shapes

    Your character's anatomies and the shapes you used for this piece is kind of wonky, but not in a good way. There are a lot of abstractly illustrated artwork out there that works very well, but the shapes you've chosen are not working here.

    The perspective is off, the portraits' forms could be executed much better, there's something wrong with the girl's hat, how she's walking, how she's holding the cake, the table is wonky too and the content on it is really weird.


    This is just a composition sketch, but this is probably how I think it should be recomposed. We can see more of the boy, there's a visible distance between the boy and the girl, the portraits on the wall are arranged more harmoniously, and I also shrunk the plant not only for the sake of distance, but also so it doesn't distract from what I think is the main piece of your drawing.


    I could go in more depth about shading and color harmony, but I really think that's enough for today. I hope you can consider my advice and that it can help you in improving your art. I'm also working on my own art, and I want to help other people just like me who started out as beginners to also strive and improve.

  • @txels thank you... I had never experimented with the color of the eyes... should do that now... thank you for your feedback

  • @Michael-Angelo-Go thanks a ton for your feedback. That was really helpful. Gonna rework my piece. Thank you again and really appreciate it, helps me get better and understand what need to be done.

  • Thank you for the feedback @Kim-Hunter

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