[Quixocalypse]

Man I used to frequent the shit out of this place like 8-9 years ago when I was a dumb teenager who was bad at art, but I was recently reminded of Void's existence and have decided to give it another go. This website has got some mad staying power. Anyway.



Name: Seraphim, The
Age: Lots
Species Magical Snake Spirit/Arguably a Naga

The Seraphim is an ancient, shapeshifting guardian spirit who has been around in some form or another since the dawn of mankind. Though she spends a lot of her time in a human guise she is primarily a mythic serpent and identifies as such. Her main abilities all relate to her essential snakeness, like poison, healing by shedding her skin, and eating things larger than her head. Her true form is a serpent big enough to eat a horse, though she can take on varying sizes and stages between being a snake and a human.

She subsists on a strict diet of devouring the wicked whole.

[Animeshen]

a naga! cool! =D i love these colours! the hands look a bit phoned in compared to how great the rest of it looks but this has my interest! i hope to see some comics!

[Rose]

You realize you have to draw her in as many different stages of transformation between human and snake as possible, right? (I say this because I want to see more, not because it's an actual requirement necessarily )

Other than that, I don't have much critique to give until you post some comic pages, more poses, etc. The one critique I do have is that in the bottom right corner of your image, the snake body/tail looks really flat. Just be aware of your light sources and make sure your shadows are consistent and cover enough area to show a round form instead of just a tiny bit of shadow because the tail is changing direction. Now that I look at it again, I think the real issue is that your highlights disappear behind the snake tail when they should really curve and be right in the middle of the section that's turning, since that's the part of her tail where the light would hit—right at the top. I hope that makes sense; I've been having serious trouble with making coherent sentences and using the right llamas lately.

[Quixocalypse]

Thanks for the crits, guys! I tried to edit it some to fix up what you guys mentioned - I'm not surprised the hands were crappy in retrospect, because I recall bitching about them while drawing the original. I tries to fix them up a bit, especially after realizing that pinkies do not remotely bend the way I had her left one going. Also, I'm pretty sure the advice on the tail shading was spot on - I changed the shape a bit and rearranged the shading and I think it looks better now.

I'm hoping to have a more thorough ref done soon, as well as some thumbs. I am struggling a little to come up with a way to introduce her that isn't totally overdone.

[Puzzlething]

     I think you could totes push your line weight variation a little more. There's nothing wrong with thin line-work, but it gets a little uniform in spots, like the coat, hands and tail.

      Also, you're shading with grey. That's fine for showing where your light source is, but that's pretty much it, and there's so much more you can do with shadows. By playing around with the colours of your shadow you can strengthen the mood of a piece, introduce new feelings, and unify colour palettes. You can really use any colour for shadows, so experiment!

[Quixocalypse]

Line variation: yes. I will definitely put some extra effort into that in the future.

Coloured shading: I am actually really interested in that idea, but the few times I've tried in the past I have not been able to make it work for me. I usually shade by colouring with black on a layer that is an opacity somewhere from 30-50 percent. If I want to shade with colour, do I use a dark shade of that colour to do that or just a medium one? To be honest I have not experimented all that much with different colouring methods in the past.

[Animeshen]

when I shade the quick and dirty way I'll throw a new layer on top, set it to "multiply" at 50% opacity, then scribble different colours until I find one that I feel sets the mood- like heres a page where I used three different colours to show a change of mood. a standard fallback I use for both my characters is purple, you may try blue because of the oranges in your character but you should experiment with a bunch to see how they look, maybe on different colour backgrounds.

[Puzzlething]

    Using a multiply layer is totally an easy way to make sure your shadow is darker, as I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get a lighter colour than the base tone you're drawing on. You can basically mess around with any colour you want, and it'll prolly be fine.

   You can also just strait up choose the new colour and draw on at full opacity. Just pay attention to your HSV( or HSL sometimes) when you're choose your shadow. As long as the value/lightness of the shadow is lower than the original base-tone your good. It's also way easier to do with a color wheel, since you can just eyeball it.

   I'd say multiply layers are faster, and they let you do some subtle changes that would be hard to just figure out in your head ("to make a purple shadow on this red colour I need to use a grey-orange haha what") but it cuts you out of getting really bold with your shadows. Personally, I mix up blending modes with strait colour picking. Sometimes I'll use the multiply layer as sort of a jumping point, and mess with it manually after I see what I get.

[Quixocalypse]

So this is still happening.



Character design sheet is pretty much finished. I've started thumbnailing my actual pages, too, but don't have any scans of that yet as they are of the incoherent sort.

Thanks for all the tips thus far!

[Animeshen]

nice, glad you're still working on this! so shes got a snake, human and naga form- cool! I like the tattoo too! looking forward to seeing some intro pages!

[Puzzlething]

Looks way better dude! The line-art feels a little stronger, and the blue shadow looks nice. Now you just have to do your pages.

[Angie]

Glad you're still around! I think the design sheet is good to go!