CGAN Dec. 2014 Challenge - Seasons Greetings - WIP

Cherry: As Charlotte said the right hand figure needs a bit of enlarging and lowering, perhaps just the animal bit at the bottom. At the moment it's a bit like those MC Escher pictures where things are both in front and behind things. But all the detailing is looking great and the decorations look shiny and accurate.

micro: There's some great action in your composition. It's rare to see Santa so dynamic and exploding out of the screen towards you. I also like the way the reindeer is developing especially the head and the expression, like it's a bit scared but still having fun! Make sure you get some good reference for the legs, I find four-legged things to be terribly difficult to do with all those different joints that I'm sadly very unfamiliar with. That's why they don't seem to appear in any of my pictures.


Done a bit of work on mine although it doesn't seem to have progressed as much as I would like. I put some detail in the cloak and cleaned up the foreground a bit. And I did a hand!
I also had a tentative go at putting a Gollum head on the snowman but it went very, very wrong. So that's disappeared again and I'll worry about it later.

Edit: Oh and for some reason I'm strangely frightened of doing that tree at the top right corner. That may be another thing that disappears later. But hey, he's a wizard, he can make anything disappear, can't he?

Cherry, your pic has so much character expression and storytelling, it looks great so far The decorated antlers is too funny. I think the centaur chic on the right could use a bit more displacement from the dude on the right too, you could try adding some holiday boots to her that would move her down a bit!

Valence coming along great, I really like the wizards robes, the environment really matches well to the characters!.Don't worry about the tree in the background it looks great so far, just paint clumps of snow on it and a bit of green sticking through.

Valence, I know the legs are a mess right now, i've been avoiding them, they seem like a puzzle to me right now I don't like Santa's face that much and his body needs a lot of work. I got the reference of the reindeer from a reindeer that was panting lol, so you got that right! I'm still plugging away but I have 7 work days left until Christmas, including Christmas Day! so I may be slower with my updates, thanks for the encouragment

I think this is a scene from Frozen (haven't seen it so I don't know for sure) and I know it's facing the wrong way for your pic but if you flip it then it might help explain how the joints bend.

REFERENCE:

Thanks for the reference Valence, I changed the angle a bit, I think the back legs look ok now but i'm struggling a little with the front ones.

That's much better micro. Keep it coming.

I've just noticed a rather silly, juvenile, schoolboy-type mistake in mine. Gandalf's staff points right at the apex of the distant mountain and because your eye likes to connect things like that together it looks like the mountain and the staff is just one big umbrella! What was I thinking?? It's Amateur Hour again.
Well, that's another thing to go on the list. And when did Gollum's head become so difficult to draw? Think it may have to be a generic Gollum-like snowman. Also I really wanted to do an Ian McKellen portrait Gandalf but because of the composition and resolution I haven't really left myself enough pixels for something too recognisable. So it'll have to be generic wizard too.
Generic right to the end, that's me.

Nice works everyone. Look forward to seeing the final pics.

Well, that's me done for this week. Wizardy face is in, corrected the size of the hand and I did some better trees left and right. I then channeled the spirit of Bob Ross to improve the misty mountains and add a line of distant pine trees. I've also drawn a (less) distant hobbity cottage on another layer but it's not in this wip as I'm trying to decide on its exact position and size. I'm also fiddling with perhaps adding a scarf for the snowman.



Next week I shall have one more desperate go at doing a recognisable Gollum face, I did do one better one the other day but it didn't look like "snow". I really don't like it as it is but it still may end up like that. Also I need to clean up the sky gradients a bit and sort out the bottom of the cloak and then finally I'll try out some falling snowflakes and see what that looks like.

Wizard is looking awesome Valence, perfect tired expression on his face at having to trek through all that snow, the trees look great now too. I think the snowman is good already, maybe just add some small thin branches to his head for the hair.

I've been spending insane amounts of time on reindeer legs ahhh! I can't get them to look the way I want, I think i'm going to finish the rest and just go back to it, before I end up shopping for a new monitor lol

I think i'm going to go with the way the legs are positioned now, going to work up the background a bit, I really need to get his body porpotioned better, something seems off but cant place it.