Opie Art

Hi. I recently found Verve Painter. I'm not experienced with forums. I'm interested in getting feedback. Thank you.

Haha,

Welcome!!
What a great piece.
Great colors and sense for volume.
I really like the exaggerated pose, quite funny.

I would just try to work on focus, on readability.
The tail has a lot of detail lots of sharp lines and contrast, so do the horse legs compared to the Face and horse head.
This way it catches a lot of attention while the real emotional parts, like face and horses eye are left quite undefined.
Lead the viewer directly to the ambitious racers face and give a clear expression there (I guess I see a very concentrated eye behind the glasses, and a tongue)
After, lead the viewer to the clear horse expression, which has mostly wide opened eyes while racing, a bit panic like.
This way, you would achieve a nice emotional contrast in this part of the imagine.
Maybe a bit sharper detail on helmet as well.
On the other hand, I would take away strong dark lines and attention from tail.

Ahh, well and some shadow for the arm

Just my two cents

Thank you Knacki,

That's the insight I needed.

I like it too - nice style and I wish you lot fun with verve and in our forum

Welcome here, Opie!
Very nice pastel like painting! I like gentle colors and your confident strokes.
Knacki said the rest and I agree with him.
Looking forward to your next paintings!

[Taron]

Wowsa, how cool is that!?! What a very different and unique style!
Welcome to the forum, Opie!
The real problem here is, that it looks beautiful and complete to me. It has a sincere and consistent style. This goes for a variety of aspects:
- you've managed to make it look almost like a felt-pen/aquarelle mixture; soft, wet and somehow washed out in a beautiful and conceivably real looking way.
- your style for proportion, posture and shape really shows one DNA that can be seen and felt.
- your color choices are deliberate, confident and sensible.

I honestly cannot fault you in any way except possibly that the tail doesn't quite reflect the dynamics of the snapshot. If it where supporting the speed more by a different choice for the direction of the strands, regardless as to how well it might reflect any reference (?), it would send this whole thing flying through the image.

Anyhow, what a pleasure to see yet another artist emerge here on the forum with a beautiful take on how to use Verve! You make me very happy and proud!
Thank you very much for joining and I can't wait to see more form you!

Thank you all for your helpful comments. An updated version is attached.

Art 2017 0070 Dark Horse.jpg (130.62 KiB) Viewed 93135 times

[Taron]

Very cute and nicely illustrative! Both versions have their very own charm!
I'm excited to see what you'll create next...kinda carefully pushing you forward right away, because it's sometimes too tempting to keep working on one painting, long after the initial impulse has faded. That's why I personally generally prefer to simply move on to the next painting, having taken in what I've heard. All of what I had heard may not have to apply to the very next motive, but it lingers and sometimes it takes time to really let it sink in.

Anyway, you very obviously have style, which is always a pleasure to see! You get this style from following YOUR heart, your instincts, your senses. When ever you hear some feedback, just let it simmer inside of you, take time to really make sense of it. Not all feedback is worthy to be an instruction, either. In fact, most of the time feedback is merely a spontaneous reaction that can't quite be formulated precisely. Language often isn't precise enough, or we don't take enough time to clarify even to our selves what we really see.

No matter what, I'm really excited to have you hear and can't wait for the next one!

Don't listen to taron, he lived to long in the USA to be straight forward.
He just wanted to say that your new picture is much better and super cute
Thanks to my obviously and undoubted fantastic feedback of course

[Taron]

Woooot! ...hmmm, I was deciding whether I should go ahead and analyze the paintings for what I personally enjoy most, but came to the conclusion that I better don't tempt Opie to accidentally get stuck on one painting. That would be tragic in my books. I literally, sincerely can't wait for the next demonstration of this style! I think it's great!
Super Straight Forward would go:
- I prefer the stylized first version, because it has the heart of a cartoon and the soul of a masterpiece. The heavily stylized tail simply had the strands stand still rather than going with the dynamics, but other than that I thought it was quite complete.
- the new version, HOWEVER, is really very nice, too. It has the heart of a cartoon and the soul of a cartoon with the dress of a masterpiece. The tail, however, doesn't have that nice grittiness conceptually, and reminds me more of a naive painting, though it's nicely consistent with everything. I just feel like Opie's intuition shows in the first one. The second one has some insecurities that weren't there before. And any further iteration might actually drift further and further away. That's why I really suggest, come back to your beautiful intuition and go for the next one!