Coop's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Splatoon Inkling]

A good start, with the simple, but bright colours and the computer game cartoon layout, this certainly encapsulates the better, more entertaining side of paintball combat. From looking at the weapon, this is more of a paint gun than a paint ball gun, though I'd assume the principal is the same.

While I'm not quite sure what the ear-like flaps of hair are for, they certainly add a dimension of perhaps protective cover for the combatant, while the squid-like familiar in the background looks entirely too cute to think dangerous... perhaps until it's too late, then he inks his opponents.

If I were going to be overly critical, I'd suggest that this piece yearns to be made into an action pose, mid shot, while an opponent is rushing onward, trying valiantly to cover her in his gooey, pigmented secretions - ooh, er.

Keep up the good work, the lines flow nicely and I think we'll see a lot more from you in the future.

SinCOMIXXX responds:

Thank you for your critique! If I ever do Splatoon-related fan art again, I'll definitely consider your suggestions! :)

[HAPPY ROBOT DAY]

Surely your non-drawing had should be doing something other than drawing... I'm not sure what, but given enough time, I could probably be chauvinistic about it.

Damn, I hate it when people are just too talented for their own damned good. I want to be able to draw, but I just don't have the ability, while here we have an example of a good artist, who whiles away a few minutes with her opposite hand and creates something better (albeit not by much) than I could draw with my main hand.

Sabtastic responds:

Aw shucks! haha Thanks, Coop.

Sorry to make you feel shitty though. x:
Just keep at it!

[Need A Light?]

Clever.

The use of the light here is highly understated. Starting off with a dark room for the spy and then having pyro spark off a lighter at the tip of his fingers gives lovely dimensions to the piece as a whole.

Simple lines for the spy make him look rather sharply dressed, as opposed to just mad at pyro for blowing his cover. Perhaps reduce the thickness of the chalk-stripes to pin-stripes on his suit and make the tie look more like a well tied knot, than a mere line down his front, as a well tied knot can jut out from the collar in a statement all on its own ;)

Finally from the spy, I might have had a snorted sigh of smoke coming out of his nostrils, as the cigarette is smoked enough for him to have taken a breath in and out. There is no need for a look on pyro's face, so just the inclination makes all the difference to such a pose. A nice use of dimmed colours, to make it all look so dark, private and indeed surreal. Keep up the good work.

Jemmuh responds:

I definitely need to look into how ties work to better draw them... It'd help if I knew people who actually wore such fancy attire.

Funny you mention the smoke coming from the nostrils, I actually originally had that drawn out but took it away in the end. Kind of regretting it now that it feels like something is missing.

Appreciated! Thanks.

[Mitsubishi Eclipse '03]

Trace?

I've just looked this piece over and thought that it looks like a traced drawing of the car, then overlaid with the design and detail that you wanted, to give it a much better look. The thing that really didn't look right was the fact that the Goodyear Eagle F1 is written upside down - any Goodyear tyre has the lettering written around the tyre the other way, with the top of the letter nearest the tread pattern. I'm not sure that the lettering would be coloured, except for gold on the sides, though black may be a good choice, so shading it with grey scale would also work.

Judging by the scene that you used, there is too much light shining off the surface of the car - the background appears to be slightly overcast, while you've got the car glinting through the sunshine, as if it were polished silver or gold. Also the question of where the light is coming from is asked, due to there being light reflected off the bonnet, front and rear wing, though not the driver's door. That seems very confusing, in my opinion.

Still, it looks nice and I wouldn't mind having a spin in it myself.

BlazingEclipse responds:

Well thanks a lot for the response. I guess when you make a 3D model based on a real object it is sort of like tracing it, if that's what you mean. The program I used to render out the model calculates the reflections on the model based on the HDRI map that I give it so I didn't have much control over that aspect. As I worked with it more it seemed that if I changed the angle of the camera more reflections appeared on the door. So that problem was from picking the wrong angle to render it out in it looks like.

[S<3T: Sudden Updraft]

Okay, I'm not sure I get it...

I can understand that this is a Japanese cartoon and tentacles, schoolgirls, sex etc, that all makes a degree of sense to me. However, I am a little concerned about the anatomy of the girl in the foreground on the right - What is going on south of her panties? Either she has a vagina that can phase through her underwear, or she has prolapsed. Neither of which is a particularly enthralling thought, I just had to mention it.

I can see how you've taken a lot of the detail out of the image, by conveniently placed scenery, removing the need for detail on the girls' knees and also by hiding their faces to one degree or another. People like me watch out for that, so in your next piece, I'd prefer to at least see some more effort in the facial detail. Yes, you're capable of recreating a little lace detail on a girl's panties, but it's not enough. The same can be said for the folded design on the fan - it should not look like it has just been overlaid, it would actually be folded and distorted to reflect this. Making this work would be a crowning glory of the piece, I would feel.

DeliciousOrange responds:

Thanks you for the review. The issue you seem to be referring to is the fact that the muscles on her inner thigh (particularly her adductor magnus and the gluteus maximus) are partially visible from the front. This is actually entirely normal and a common occurrence in women with well defined muscles. This is known more commonly as "the gap" in some circles.

The reduction of detail in areas like the face and knees is to help focus attention on the key points of the illustration, in this case the flipped skirts and panties. Faces are inherently very effective at drawing attention, which is why they are almost entirely obscured here; they would draw too much attention away from the intended focus of the image.

As for the designs, it is a matter of balancing time invested in rendering and effectively communicating the content of the image. Tentacle Bento: Double Major is a very large project with many illustrations, so each image has a limited amount of time available to invest in it. The fact that you recognized it as a folding fan even without the detailed rendering makes it a success for communicating the content of the image, so in terms of the investment of time to the return of effective communication that is quite a good ratio.

[Turanga Leela]

I love how you've subtly blended the looks of the cartoon Leela, with the real life Katey Sagal, particularly around the mouth - it looks very powerful and yes, of all of the aliens out there, I would love to get to know this particular specimen (okay, we all know she's really a mutant, but who cares) a lot better.

Perhaps you overdid the shading on the abdomen part of the top, since her breasts are not that massive to have their own gravitational pull, dragging light away from her stomach quite that much.

Other than that, the curves are great, her eye is fantastically detailed (I can see that an expression for the monobrow would have been difficult to conceive, with no real reference to draw upon, so I won't criticise. Her hair is another high detail area with what seems like each individual strand painted in, which must have taken hours.

Certainly one to come back to and admire again.

bigCman321 responds:

Thank you for the well thought out review, I appreciate it!

[SpideyKitty]

Not Awful...

Although I would have to say that this piece is pretty average, without me getting into too much detail about what I disliked about it. A lack of background was a big issue here, as I could have overlooked other lack of detail with some other detail to look at.

The big, overdone signature is horrendous - you're not writing a cheque here, you're supposed to make your signature at least legible, so that someone knows who drew it. In this technological age, that's practically redundant, but in a piece which could legitimately be stolen, putting it into the piece so that it cannot be easily cropped or erased from the piece would be a better thing.

What's with the cutaway mouth piece? If the cat had an opening for the mouth, why not also one for the eyes, which would have given a much freakier look to the face. Also, the legs are poorly positioned - the left leg should have been attached in the fore of the body, not behind, creating an awkward position of two shoulders on the right side of the cat, in effect. It's either that, or you've got the cat in a ridiculous pose, where the body is facing backwards, the feet to its left and the face towards us...

Lacking in distortion for the mask's contours and the web effect causes me to mark it down, though I do commend you on the level of detail for the fur. Sadly, this looks like the only thing that I favoured for the piece.

[Review Request Club]

SerPounce responds:

Just went ahead and edited the signature in what is hopefully a more bearable way, I don't understand your reasoning for the cutaway eyes, the reason I put in a cutaway mouth was because a cat would still be able to, you know, bite, a cat does not bite with its eyes, Coops.

[Twitter Faces #1]

Apparently, I'm constipated...

That and TehSlapHappy looks like a Paedophile, pushing illicit Pepsi onto those poor unsuspecting kiddies, but I really like this. A great way to kill a few hours for you, no doubt and a good chance for me to think of how I'd sound in some of your pieces. Definitely with your voice, that's a character I can see taking off... Mind you, I'd probably get pwned by John and his Olympian gods.

We need to get a group shot, perhaps from the next meet and get someone to draw each participant, much like this. Would you do a commission for us and how many beers would be required?

[Review Request Club]

JohnnyUtah responds:

you have no idea how many characters i draw that look very similar to your caricature.

i don't drink beer, but you can pay me in gold bullion

[Kitty Cat Sketch]

Looks more like a fox...

With the angular face, which goes to a point, the shape of the ears and the tail, this looks more vulpine, than feline. Most cat's ears can be drawn quite simply as triangles poking out of the top of the head and the face is generally more ovoid. Add the that, the general absence of whiskers and it starts to show more than your average cat, to me.

A decent job with the shading, but I would urge more on the shading at the shoulders / hips, just to show where the joint sticks out of the side. Accentuate it and build it into the colour of the fur - that's where the real skill as an artist comes from.

Finally, you should consider making this a colour piece. It would give a much greater degree of realism to the piece itself and allow you to progress to other things, such as backgrounds. Good luck.

[Review Request Club]

SerPounce responds:

I believe the major thing about the head (other than the ears) that makes it seem vulpine is the eye's unnatural slant, but that was a result of me attempting for 15 minutes to no avail to get those eyes down, but I finally got that and decided to settle on it and stop fussing.

Thanks for the tips about shading, however, I never really got the hang of shading (mostly from my obsession with doodles and not full projects), so any tips on shading are really helpful.

[A Twisted Transparency Poster]

Got me hooked.

This piece is a great sign of how accomplished that you've become at graphic design, over your years of experience. What lets you down, I feel is the shape of faces, but in a piece like this, that doesn't really take away too much, from the grand scale of things. I'd like to see a little more in the way of a traditional skull shape, not just an ellipse - even ovoid shaped faces have more similarities to human skulls than that and those are from the bottom of the barrel, which, thanks to other factors, you should be nowhere near. I'd lower the top of the head and have the taper for the jaw, where it looks like a smaller ellipse has merged with a larger one, giving the classical jaw / cheek bone overhang. Perhaps that's being overly picky, though.

Graphically, there is a bizarre similarity between your Twisted Transparency logo and that used for Take That, the UK male vocal group... I'm not sure if you'll have a vampiric Gary Barlow, or a spectral Robbie Williams, perhaps Jason Orange as a serial killer, but that's just strange.

You have a great colour scheme here and the various circles give away various clues as to what might be contained in the movie or comic, perhaps both.

Keep up the good work, I look forward to viewing the fruits of your labours.

[Review Request Club]

Celx-Requin responds:

Hiya Will,

The only U.K. group I listen to is "Turin Brakes", so I can't speak to any album art comparisons, I am a fan of the "100 bullets" comic book covers though and they feature a lot of intricate floral patterns.

Also that's not a face, it's a mask, obviously you wouldn't be able to have known that since the cartoon isn't finished yet.

Thanks again for the review,
I'm glad you feel my art has improved over the years!
- Celx