Birthday Present: One Day in Dreams

Hello from the weekly commenting of ! This caught my eye from the various images, so here I am.

Having commented on a couple of your works before, I will start out by saying you have improved. Good work! The faces are much better and the background is pretty nicely detailed as well. Keep up the good work! I do think that your heavily accented strokes on the curtains and bed canopy clash as bit with the strokes of your characters. I like strokes like what you've done, but it does compete with the characters. By that I mean I find my eye drawn away from the characters and to the curtains. There are two ways to counter this. You can give stronger strokes on your characters or use lighting to draw the eye to them. Given what I have seen of your style, you might want to try blending your background strokes a bit more and maybe adding a layer of shadow to make the curtains less obvious. Another thing I notice is that the pink in the canopy and curtains stands out against the mostly blue background. Try adding that same pink into the other features of the background and the skin of the characters to make it less obvious. I'm not entirely sure how to do it digitally, but if I were to paint something like this traditionally, I would blend little specks of color in with all the main colors in my palette. So if I had three blues, two purples, two main flesh tones and the two main hair colors, I would add a speck of pink . It would not make much of a change at all, but because there is some in the other colors, it makes it so the eye is not so easily drawn to the pink. Using the same basic principle, you would not add any of the flesh colors to anything but the characters making them more noticeable because they have colors the rest of the scene lacks. The other thing I notice is that their blanket looks a bit less obvious than some of their surroundings. Maybe some more color added into it might help. Along the same vein, the pillows behind them are a bit flat compared to everything else. They are further back, so it makes sense. The only problem is that the curtains are much more noticeable, so that makes them look a bit funny. On an unrelated note, I love how you did their hair, especially the blonde's hair. I appreciate that even more since you don't often see curly or wavy hair.

Glad to see that you have been improving. I hope this comment was somewhat helpful.