Kinsei's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Earth]

A well earned 9...

At first I thought this was water color. Especially when I was looking at the earth. And I could see others making a similar perception. You have done some pretty nice work on the planet itself. I also like the space. you have a but of a hint of some blue and green floating through space, giving it a much more mystical feel than a solid black. Also the mixture reminds me much of the Hubble images that NASA releases from time to time.
I tend to get lost in the majesty of the beauty of space and spend hours looking at images and the stars themselves from my own porch. But even will all that time admiring those distant lights, I have never been able to reproduce their beauty on canvas, paper, rock or a monitor. And here, in this simple, abstract form you have produced, you have seemed to capture something that is still elusive to me.

Moving on from my more sensitive self (BACK IN TO YOUR CAGE DAMNIT!). I think you have done a pretty solid job here. One thing I really want to point out is that this seems to have a bit of a texture to it. Even the planets seem to be a little raised. off your canvas a little. And it even seems like you have a rough bumpy texture other places as well. Although that could be the glitter that I suspect you used.

Speaking of, what did you paint this on? Cardboard or wood? I'm thinking wood cause I think I see some of of the texture poking through.

One of the things I think that could be adjust with this is the actual lighting. It seems like you had a bright light on when you took the photo, and it is reflecting off the piece kind of badly. You should take a second shot and try and get a more even lighting over it to prevent such a harsh glare.

So sweet man, Keep it up.
You should upload the one you prepped with the tarot card backing and such so people can see it as well.

MajesticBob responds:

Yeah spray paint is highly reflective so after MANY shots I chose that one because the glare looked like light from the Sun adding to the realism. I think you meant to give me a 9 but gave me a 10. I'll take it! No take backs! Lol. I'm really touched by your review. Thank you. As for texture, this was done on a 1' x1'x piece of pine. I used Spray Paint and only spray paint, Not a drop of glitter. I used paint layering for the texture. It was painted with earth colors (hence space has that rainbow effect and yes it was intentional) put a coffee can down and sprayed black around it. the stars were white, silver, and gold using a "dusting" technique, that if you look at my guns you'll notice I do that a lot. The moon was spray paint into a roll of electrical tape using a "flooding" technique that gave the moon it's cratered look. I am supremely proud of this.

[Embarrassed Girl]

Some Adjustments

To add on to what I was saying earlier. You have her off balance. I made a quick example here in the Dump: http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/eddbb891c1549b10fa9848d4805a2fe5
The red line is to show you the Vertical and Horizontal Axis. The blue arrow is to show which way I tilted the piece. I did nothing else but rotate the piece a little to try and put her more on balance.

I can see you wanted to go for the shit, trying to hide away from the crowd, kind of pose here, and it starts to work, you just need to practice it a little more.

For the line work, it looks like you are trying to use some sort of felt tipped pen, like a sharpie or something. I would suggest to only use those on very large pieces. Perhaps if you got an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie, then it could be used for this. You should look in to some technical pens. Some are pretty cheap and easily picked up.
Also play with your line weight a little. At the moment you have this constant thickness of line around the whole body. By tapering the line in certain areas you can achieve a much more dynamic look with the line art alone.
A down side of technical pens is that this will be harder to maintain, but can be done by manually adding the line weight yourself.

Good luck on your next piece, and feel free to drop by the art form again for more helpful tips and pointers.

[The Simple]

Excellent

Wow, pretty solid. This should be a pretty nice contender for robot day.
I like the consistency of the color. You have kept up the sepia tone very nicely.
Your lighting is very good. Normally I would make mention for you to make much stronger and clearer highlights, but then that would have been inconsistent with the style if the piece. You have done well with giving metallic looks to certain areas, which is very nice on its own.

Over all I like this piece, and its mostly pretty well done, except for one part, and that is the duplicating of the robot. Sadly its kind of obvious that you have the same bot copied and pasted for quite a while. I don't blame you, it would have been a lot of work to paint a different robot each time. I would have been looking for a short cut as well. What you should have done, and can still do very quickly and easily (especially if this is done in layers) is use some gradient overlay to dull out some of the color of the robots in the back. You can also take a few minuets and try and add a couple of marks on different robots to try and separate them. I understand that they are fresh out of the factory, which I can see in the background, but you gotta separate them a little, or you will get this repetitive look that will stand out really bad.

Very nice. Good luck on Robot Day!

xTY3x responds:

thank you for reviewing this work. about the copy and paste stuff... i knew from the beginning i would have done it. the one thing i tried to do was to copy a basic stage of the robot and then refining lighting and shading individually, to avoid that bad effect, but i suppose i didn't manage to reach my objective. anyway, thanks for taking your time, we'll see on robot day.

[Contingency Plan]

Pretty Sweet...

I saw this a few days ago and thought it was pretty sweet. I even brought it up to a couple of buddies. So lets face it, zombies rock. and I think you do the Zombie Genre some justice with this. I also like to skate, and wouldn't mind having this on my deck as I roll by either.

So on to it.

You have done a pretty sweet job at keeping the style consistent over the entire piece. And I like the rough grunge style, it mixes well with both Skateboarding and Zombies.

You have a nice over all composition. It works well. Even with the bending perspective on the upper buildings it still works by wrapping your eye around the piece and making you look at it all just a bit longer.

I think on the ejecting shell, you could have played with some metallic coloring on the rear end. But you didn't draw any brass on the shell. Sadly it's a missed opportunity. YOu could have brought some badass focal points to it as well.

Sadly the type is a little on the illegible side. This is mostly caused by some of the letters being so squeezed so tight that its a bit difficult to make out what they are. This is most prevalent on the "My." At first I thought it was a bunch of quotation marks or something. This is something you will want to adjust
I noticed that the stroke around your lettering is about an 80% gray though, I think it would have been much more solid as a 100% Black.

Still a pretty awesome piece. I think I will be dropping back by from time to time to drop some 5's on it.

Lintire responds:

Heya, Kinsei, thanks for the review! You hold the honour of giving me the first ever review on Newgrounds that's been genuinely helpful.

You're certainly right about the text! I have to get that altered and "fixed", asap. Might even upload an improved version of the text with the picture: if that's even allowed. I'll get to it. The gray was a terrible aspect to leave there and it needs to be repositioned anyway.

The metallic brass thing, on the other hand, didn't even occur to me. I'll have to look out for that in future pieces.

Anyway, comparing this to some reviews you've written a while ago, you've certainly gotten better at writing them. Thanks again, mate.

[Deepsea Fools]

Very Strong, Very Subtle

The obvious force behind this piece is the lighting. Over all you have done a pretty spectacular job with it. The only thing I would mention with it is that I wish you had added in a couple of super strong highlights to give some areas a glossy look. Places like the the eyes of both fish. The teeth of the larger fish as well as a couple of places on the larger fish's lips. And right at the tip of the smaller fish. With a couple of these strong highlights you would have gotten a much more strong contrast to the background.

The drawing itself is pretty solid as well. It goes along with the lighting.

It would have been nice if you could have gotten the background color to match the NG gray a little more for the illusion of this beast simply coming out of the site at the viewer. it would have been a pleasant hair raising surprise.
Perhaps you can do a similar one in the future.

I am seeing a solid progression in your skill, very nice keep it up. Your newer pieces prove that.

Luwano responds:

Thanks a lot. I had some advice (from ToaS and Ornery if I remember right) via stickam on how to do dynamic lighting. I didn't show them any WIPs just general advice, but I still think it helped a lot.

And you are of course completely right that it could use some stronger highlights. But I guess I was too careful with it again.

I also started with NG grey as darkest colour but it wasn't dark enough for me so I changed it. You can still make out the NG grey as a mid-tone on the abominal anglerfish.

Thanks for your review!

[Steambot's Walk]

Beautiful, Simply Beautiful

You, my friend, have done a simply stunning job on this. As for actual technique critique, I honestly cannot come up with and. You have solid line work, excellent coloring, beautiful texturing, exquisite atmosphere, everything.
The only suggestions I can truly bring to the table are more of a aesthetic nature rather than a technical one.

Being steam punk I think you could have added a little more steam coming from the chest and shoulders. Since you have what looks like furnace grates over those areas I think you could have gotten some sweet smoke effects from that.

The last thing I want to mention is that you may have wanted to bend the knees of the bot just a little. It would add a little weight to the character as well impact him to the scene.

Still excellent job. You have really out done your self here. Congratulations.

[Error]

It Is A Start...

One of the biggest things I have a issue with this is the lack of clarity. Everything seems kind of blurry and having any sort of real solid definition. The joints, the contour, parts of the background, they all seem to lack anything that really reinforces the figure or piece in general.
I think you should go back and give this more contour. It would also be a good chance to give this a stronger metallic feel. The arm could use more of a metal feel by adding a array of lights and a darks along the length of the arms and head to re enforce the material.
Take a moment and look at these pictures of metals and how they reflect and surroundings;
http://www.etftrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Stainless_Steel_Pipe.jpg
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/images/steel_kapoor.turning.lg.jpg
http://image.made-in-china.com/4f0j00qBSacpbrJEog/Stainless-Steel-Tube-2.jpg
Now your robot doesn't have to have mirror quality reflections, but more of the basic lights and shadows worked and formed steel tends to put off.

One thing I do enjoy about more the majority of the piece is the lighting. if it wasn't a robot made of metal, but a normal human then the light play would be pretty good. you have done a pretty good shadow cast except for a few areas.
One of those areas is the reflection in the mirror. the hand above the eye cast a shadow straight down. the lighting on the rest of the robot suggest that the light source is not exactly above, but a little more to the right and a little closer to the mirror. Although this isn't a perfect shadow, it does serve a purpose for the piece which I guess is a good enough excuse.
I Kind of enjoy the blue lighting on the back of the head but it lacks a source. I'm assuming that you want the source to be in the head, but at the moment the only thing that would make sense is that their was an independent light off the scene projecting on to the robot, but that doesn't work either because then the light would be projected on more than what it is. I thin you should get something in the scene, particularly in the head to have a source for this blue light. Also on the robots left hand the blue light has a strong hit on the top of two of it's fingers. the only way for their to be a light that strong on that side would be if you had a light at a completely different angle, so you may want to correct that.

One of the last things I want to point out is the yellow sparks. They seem so out of place and have no real reason to be there. I think if you want them coming from wires, which I think you do since I can see some wires starting to lead there, then you should get some fraying to those ends. This will give you some opportunity to have some more fun with some unique lighting.

At the moment, I think you have a start, but it is kind of shaky. You need to go back and make some corrections so people have a much better idea of what this bot is made of, as well as its form. The more defined and cleaned up you make this the better it'll look.
Good luck, if you choose to make any changes, take them one at a time and it will lesson the work load.
I will look forward to seeing some improvement in your future pieces.

[CS6 Custom]

Is There More To This?

I had to google the Recon gun. I have been out of the loop of Nerf for a while so some of the models that have come out in the past 5 or 6 years are a little unknown to me. As a matter of fact the Maverick is the last one I bought, but I have no clue where it went over time. And talk about old it was one of the original blue ones... But enough about me. The reason I asked my initial question is because I googled the full gun and as I saw it has a whole array of attachments, and I was wondering if you were going to get to mod them as well.
Its a shame your friend wanted such a basic mod, this had some nice capabilities to add some nice accents to the paint job.
As for the piece. I think you may have wanted to grind off the nerf logo just a little more. It is still kind of visible. Also the paint job itself seems kind of rough. Since you said your friend was in a hurry to get it, I assume you were under a pretty strict deadline. That too bad because with a little more time, and a little more creative freedom, I think you could have done a much better job on this one.

So yeah try and get those logo's sanded a little more, and a bit smoother pain and you'll be fine.
keep it up and better luck next time.

MajesticBob responds:

Funny thing about the CS6 Those Logos are on for life. Power sanding BARELY pu t a dent in them. Yeah, there are more attachments. And yeah he just wanted ARs removed a basic paint over.

[Maverick Special]

Bang Bang!

These are definitely getting better my man.
Although I have got to mention that I'm not fond of the lack of multiple views. I know you have some in yout thread, but here would be nice as well. Especially since you don't have the harsh size restrictions that we have to deal with in the Forum.

One thing I would like to see more of, especially on a custom like this, is more scraped metal. You can dry brush it in or you can take a little silver paint on a small piece of paper and act like you are sanding certain areas and edges. It will also give the gun a more worn feel. The reason I bring this up is because I can see where you have some major scratches carved in, and I think by adding the minor scratches will help you reinforce that look with out much effort.

Speaking of what are you using to add those battle scars? I'm just curious, but I assume a dremel tool.

One thing I need to point out, a flaw, is the seam of the gun. you can see the original yellow plastic starting to poke through. Similar problem are happening with the trigger and the screw holes. You may want to take the extra step to primer these a little more.

I am really although there is a few areas (the seam), I am really enjoting the paint job. The paint looks metallic which gives it a really cool Scifi-fantasy feel. Even Lulu mentioned that the feathers give it a Final Fantasy feel too.

Keep it up, I hope to see more customs from you, and not just guns either. I hope to see some more really cool stuff. I may even have to give it a shot myself soon.

MajesticBob responds:

Indeed a Dremel for the scars. The seam is because of the damn camera flash. In person you can not see it. But eh, I'll keep on trucking. Gas Masks to come soon.

[Do Androids Dream of Hot Girl?]

Nicely Done

Sorry it has taken me so long to get to this one, I really meant to get to it sooner, but you know how life gets in the way some times. So lets get started, shall we?

One of the best things of this is definitely the lighting. You have done a pretty spectacular job. Much like your halo piece, I have to admit that you do have a very solid grasp on lighting.
The Pose is nice. I think it works well for this piece. At first I thought it was a little bland, but I the realized that it was very fitting for the piece. And then mixing it with your strong lighting and good coloring made the pose and piece.
I would also like to mention the robotic arm. I think it was pretty well done. I think for the arm itself . I like the synthetic muscle and the structure. Very good job. But the hand, sadly the hand isn't as well done as the arm. I think you cold have gotten a little more intricate and detailed with the hand.
And this is the part where I have to point out a couple of things that aren't so good about the picture. I'll just try to be quick about it though.
One of the big offenses is the cut off of the legs. You have the characters abruptly end, and at the knees none the less. This makes it seem like the characters have no legs
The girl's arm that is extended is a little long. I know you know anatomy and proportions, so I can bet you know the arm is off. But I felt it should be mentioned anyway.
I noticed that the Android's thumb seems a little off. The shirt under it seems to be lacking shading.

Anyway. I think you have a very solid piece. I hope you do well for robot day.

xTY3x responds:

thank you for reviewing my piece. i cut the legs because i thought leaving them would have ruined the composition. i mean, the legs going down to the bottom would have unbalanced it. as for the robotic hand i tried to go for a terminator style, which as you know is pretty rough and the particular lighting wouldn't illuminate every part of it, just the top. i think her arm is ok: if you extend your arm along your side you see that your fingers reach the middle of your femor and if you rotate her arm i think you can see it's of the right lenght. if i thought it was wrong i wouldn't have uploaded it. also i think the thumb is ok, it's in the same position of the "human" one, so... and indeed the shirt is lacking shading because all the visible part is exposed to light. thank you for taking your time to give me your opinion, you're a good reviewer.