Fro's art Reviews on Newgrounds

["Comet" Cityscape Background]

Ironic

It's funny that you would request this on my userpage as I had just said how cool I thought this picture was when I was searching for a night/campfire background for a flash project. This wasn't what I was looking for, but it's really amazing.

It looks like a something that you would expect to see in a professionally animated cartoon on TV. There's a lot of detail in this and I can tell that you put a ton of effort into it.

The use of blues, blacks, and purples really compliment each other perfectly in this piece. It's really impressive how you added all the tiny lights and the detail even to the point of properly having a shadow cast over a part of the town where the mountain is.

An all around amazing piece. Keep up the good work!

zeedox responds:

That's awesome how you'd found this picture already! Thanks for the good feedback - its interesting how simple details like a shadow from the hills is a critical part to making the composition work.

[English Teacher]

I like it

Yes, I can see this being an English Teacher for sure. Even though most of my English teachers have been female it's kind of funny that the one male teacher that I did have in the subject looks oddly like this fellow here. You're missing one thing though. Something that would make this person go from random nerd guy to English Teacher. A lame tie!

Other than the missing tie I really like the character all around. I do suggest adding a background to the picture. I understand that this is just a character design, but add a chalkboard in the background with some sort of lame quote from literature that people would recognize.

I hope you do finish this comic and I think your drawing ability would be really great for flash animations. I can see a flash series using characters that look like this for sure.

~ Review Request Club ~

Iplaygames responds:

Hmm... A tie just might be a great addition. As for scenery, I'm going to work on it. It's going to take place in a coffee shop... So I'll see.

As for animation, I WOULD like to do it, but don't know where to begin. I could do frame by frame... but that would take loads of dedication and motivation. I will consider, though.

[The Hills]

Very nice painting.

Very surreal, it's a picture of something that I would expect to see in my hometown when driving around in the country. The smooth colors really make it a relaxing piece. The colors are very well blended together. It's not just one color and then the next all of a sudden, they are very well mixed and matched. The colors are very fitting all in all, but shouldn't the lighter colors be closer to the front and the darker colors in the back?

All that good stuff is... good.. I would just suggest adding something to the picture. It's so empty and so bland. I had mentioned earlier that I would expect to see something like this in the country, but I lied slightly. I've never saw a landscape in my life that was that empty. I'm sure their out there, but I suggest challenging yourself by adding more wildlife, plants and/or animals.

It'll make you better as an artist and the viewers will enjoy it more!

~ Review Request Club ~

Joshsouza responds:

Thanks so much for the review, It's the first review that I have got with a "8 or higher". I will try and add in more things in my next landscape.

[Lennon]

Pretty much with SeeD419 said

Creating something like this is perfectly fine, but submitting as itself as an art submission really has no purpose. Like I said, the character is done good and I think that it will look great in a flash game. The bad thing is it's by itself.

Even if you don't have a background for the game ready make one specifically for this submission. You could either add a stage and a bunch of people in the crowd looking up at him, him up with his band, or just him by himself on a empty stage, but you really do need to add something.

If you were to leave the picture alone by itself then I suggest making it much larger so you could add slightly more detail and we could really get a good look at it instead of us squinting our eyes to see this tiny thing by itself.

~ Review Request Club ~

[Homersaur]

I haven't reviewed something of yours in a while..

I have to say it really looks like you've improved since then. While this picture is very simple, the style is very fitting and it looks half way decent. It seems that the static is just a random picture of static that you found and threw on a different layer or simple drew over. Perhaps you should attempt making everything yourself? (sorry if you did make the static, if so it looks good)

The character of Homer mixed with a dinosaur is a very interesting idea. I think you could make him look much better though. I know you have your simple style, but imagine what Homersaur would look like if you spent a long time on it. If you don't want to take that approach then perhaps the next step is the Simpsonsaur approach. Maybe creating the entire family in one picture.

You could have all of them be different dinosaurs even though that wouldn't make much sense as different dinosaurs wouldn't be able to interbreed, but who really cares. Maybe have their pet dog and cat be pet humans or something ironic like that. I'm assuming a dinosaurs donut would be bigger as well. :P

All in all you still have a lot of room to improve, but this is one of your better pieces for sure.

~ Review Request Club ~

up-a-notch responds:

so color inside the lines?

[Doubles13- First Contact]

This is awesome.

One quick question though... where's the mayhem on the streets? Where are all of those people running for their lives and cars crashing into buildings? You mean to tell me that everyone safely evacuated the area in a calm and orderly fashion, which in return left nobody behind, not even their vehicles? :P Perhaps that was just something you missed, but in my opinion it would have added a lot of life to this submission.

That's honestly the only complaint (if you can call it a complaint) that I had about the submission at all though. In fact, I added it to my favorite art submissions. You lost a little bit of quality as the picture went back, but I would love to see something like this in a flash animation. Art like this in a flash would be front paged and probably bring in a nice amount of ad revenue to go along with it.

Anyways, a short review for me, but it's always been hard for me to review a submission when I don't find much fault with it and when I enjoyed it like I did this submission. Keep up the good work and keep requesting in the Review Request Club.

~ Review Request Club ~

Mabelma responds:

Thank you so much for the kind words, it's great to hear so many with all the work we put to this. Now that you say it, we kinda this missed it, I'll talk to my partner (the one I collaborated with) and ask him if he would want to add those things. I'm glad you liked it and about the Flash thing I would love to hear what you have in mind or if you could explain a little more cause I really didn't understand it send me a pm whenever you can.

[Gone with the Wind]

Gone with the light?

Things that I thought could have been better:

Why is your picture so dark man? You are getting light on the front end of the barn, but the rest of the picture is so dark and doesn't really make sense. With the moon shining through like that and with lightning hitting at the same exact moment the screen should be lit up very bright with a lot of shadows being casted. Instead, there is just one big dark screen that really ruins the submission in my opinion because it covers up the details that were much needed.

Another problem that I have is the fact that the lightning isn't touching the ground. A common argument might be that the lightning hasn't touched the ground yet, but it's common knowledge that lighting starts from the sky and the ground at the same time and meets in the middle. This means that you need lightning to touch the ground to make the picture be accurate and to look good.

The lightning itself should have had more details. I don't think of lightning as a beam of perfect light, but instead something that has it's flaws and is destructive. More twists and turns, cracks and breaks, etc... The lightning looks more like god beaming light down to save people more than it does lightning.

Things that I liked:

I feel that if this wasn't so dark that it would honestly have the quality to be something that I would add to my favorites. The detail that you put into the barn and the tractor look really good and they are very professional. In fact, if I knew that you could do art like this then I would call you dumb for looking for an artist for your games all the time. The art is good enough to create award winning flash movies and games. You can draw this on the computer so draw with this program and put it into flash!

I liked the tornado, the sky, and the dirt that was kicked up. I think you could go even further with the dirt (but yet again this involves making the picture lighter as a whole) by making the dirt it kicked up less solid and turning it into more of a dust with smaller pieces of earth in it. A brown color or something would have been better for the earth instead of the black that you used.

Overall:

I would like to see you change the time of day in this piece of art from night to earlier in the day so we can see the details. Even at this time of night you would get much more light that you can actually see from the moon and the lightning. You had a lot of detail in the tractor and barn, so why don't you add the same amount of detail to the lightning and everything else in the picture?

While it does have it's flaws, this is by far the best piece of work that I have seen from you and with more practice I think you could create things that I would consider to be my favorites. Keep on working and start implementing great artwork like this into your flash submissions!

~ Review Request Club ~

MCarsten responds:

Thanks for the nice review! Well, almost everyone else told about the darkness, but for be more true with all physics on it, put the light maybe on the sides of the barn and from the tornado, would be really more realistic, but I did the darkness for show that is a catastrophic natural disaster, with all the dust, wrecks, pieces of wood, land, tractor and bolts in the middle of the scene.

Also, thanks for like my tractor and the bolt design, I also liked them, but my favorite from all of this, I think is really the tornado with that pices on rotation according his axis. And about like that this was my best art, I really need to give you a big thanks here too.

Thanks again!
SpyS.

[Midnight]

View at full size!

Wow, this one is truly amazing when being viewed at full size!

Anyway, The color of the sky was absolutely beautiful. I loved the combination of lighter blue, darker blue, and the whites. You had a great color balance in the sky and it really added a lot to the picture. It's by far my favorite part of the submission. That might be a bit biased though as I'm a big fan of the color blue.

You didn't make the moon did you? It seems that you took an already done moon and just cropped it out of it's original picture. I say this because when you zoom in you can see the amount of realistic detail and the edges that looked like you used the magic eraser tool to get all the color away from it. Anyway, if you made it then props to you it's amazing, but for some reason I'm going to assume you didn't create the moon itself.

The wildlife gives the illusion that someone is laying on their back and viewing this site from a field or something like that. The thing is the plants are way too solid and dark. I think if you would have made them a bit lighter and made them slightly thinner/more transparent that you would have had a better view here. That being said, the dark black does give a great balance which focuses our eyes to the blue and the moon, which is obviously the main attraction anyway.

I enjoyed this all around. Keep up the good work.

~ Review Request Club ~

Imacow responds:

The moon was not mine, good catch :P

Thanks for the review

[Mushroom Kingdom Stand-Up 1]

Lame jokes can be funny sometimes.

In this case it was funny. :P

I felt a little dumb for the first five seconds after finishing the comic because I hadn't quite understood it. Six seconds came around and I did one of those luybsty type of laughs. (Laugh under your breath silently to yourself)

So how to review a comic submission... let's see here... I suppose we go one picture at a time then. The gold and ?redish? color that you used in the very top picture around the mic was very fitting. The hat and mic had a surprising amount of detail for a comic like piece.

The rest of the pictures were done very well, but I do have a comment about the nose and the *thinks to himself which way he is facing* and the left eye combination. (The viewers right and Luigi's left) When clicking on the picture and seeing the outline used for the nose it looks quite odd so close the the face. I suggest doing one of the following three; make the outline a bit thinner, make the outline of the nose further from the eye, or a combination of the both.

The ghost was great as well, but also makes me think of a possible thing you could have done with the picture. Perhaps if you would have made a detailed background instead of the solid color then you could have made the ghost somewhat transparent which would allow something to barely show through him.

Overall, I think that this picture would have been a bit better if it had a detailed background and perhaps if you did it in the more traditional comic set-up, going left to right and having rows instead of the single column.

~ Review Request Club ~

Iplaygames responds:

Thanks a ton... this review's given me the most help yet.

I now DO see the problem with the nose... and know how to fix it. I should make it either give it more of a "3d" kinda look, or just eliminate the line touching the eye all together.

As for a background, I wish I would've done a brick wall now... But didn't think of it at the time. As for transparency... I'm going to look into that as well.

Thanks again.

[Burned Tower (Ecruteak City)]

I have some tips for you. :)

My college art class taught me how to use colored pencils and crayons properly. I know that this is colored pencils and that you didn't use crayons, but you have to understand that you did it so poorly that you actually made it look like you used crayons. :(

The way to use color pencils is to color very lightly over and over again. Here you have a lot of white space and it looked as you barely put any effort into the coloring part. In fact, the coloring part should take several hours because it needs to be a very slow process and which you cover up all the white spaces.

Like I said, very lightly color over and over until you cover all the white. Make sure you aren't coloring in one area more than another area or you'll get dark patches like you had here in many places of your picture. I recommend also keeping one of the soft gummy erasers around where you can gently pat some of the darker spots off and it can be really nice if shading.

While we are on the subject of shading I'd like to add that you need to work on your shading skills a little as well. It's also a very long process that takes a lot of concentration and focus. For example, your darker areas of your picture (let's use the blue for example) need to be a dark blue where the shadow would be located and then you need a very subtle gradient. I actually recommend making the whole thing light and then working over the next area a little darker and repeating the process over and over until an area is done.

The trees need a lot more detail, which could be made just by putting in some lines. As well, make it more round by making the outer darker and the inner lighter. The lines could show a roundness by making the inside lines thicker (in the very middle) and as they go out in a circle like manner make them thinner and closer together. Take this submission for example with a tree. (by the way it was made with crayons)

http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/fro/crayonscape

On top of learning how to make round objects round from that picture you can also see the subtle shading that I was talking about.

All around, the picture was drawn about average. (About what I could do in a drawing if I hadn't taken a few days time on it) The coloring was very below average though in my opinion and it's what needs the most work. Keep on working though and I hope to see you improving in the near future.

~ Review Request Club ~