Audra Says: Hoi Filia~! From what I can see, you have a great start~! You have a nice composition of Red looking up intently at the sky/stars. The linework for Red looks great~! ^___^ I'm not very adept at drawing animals myself and he has a lot of personality in that little section that you have there. Now, to focus in on what you are more interested in: your CG work and shading. Because you are hesitant to work with darker shadows, Red does look a bit "cloudy" and he glows against a night sky.. I'm not sure if this is intentional because of the stars that glow around his body. You might want to start off with a darker base color for his body, like a deeper orangey-brown color and use a smaller airbrush to work in the highlights. It will help to make him stand out more against the photographic background you have set. What I advise you to do is to work large. I'm not sure what program you are using to CG your work, but I'm assuming that you work with a mouse. Working large (i.e. higher resolution like 200dpi) will help you keep your CG work clean. Also, work slow, because you really do get out of your CG what you put in. ^_^ Also, try working with darker shadows. It's hard to give it a try in the beginning, but when you start to visualize in your mind where light falls, shadows are not far behind. Something you can try is to squint your eyes when looking at your piece... the colors sort of get swished into light and darker values. That way you can see if you have your lights and darks in the right areas. Lastly, I'm glad that you don't use lighting filters for your stars. That's a common mistake that people always make. It's best to think of creative ways of coming up with your own. ^__^ Good work and keep trying~!

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Jennifer Zee Says: Hey Filia-chan ^_^! (I'll start with the goods ^_^) This is a great pic! Along with the even colouring that you maintain throughought the picture, the composition effectively draws the viewer through the whole piece without putting too much emphasis on any one point. Most importantly (IMHO), the piece is inspirational ^_~! I am most certainly not a connoisseur in CG-ing, but I'll try to give you a few pointers on CG stuff ^_^. First off, you might try to use darker colours, or at least colours with greater contrast. You should add detail (like muscle tone, or bone structure) by using a smear tool or just a smaller brush and smear/paint definite shadows and countours. As far as the drawing is concerned, when drawing a profile of Red, you may want to try adding fur to the bottom of the throat and chest (actually drawing out the separate clumps of fur) to make him look more shaggy and animal-like. What you’ve done kind of gives me the impression that Red’s been shaved ^^;. You may also want to try adding more lines [around the eye] to emphasize and give more expression to the eye. Overall, I think this is a great piece, but more detail can’t hurt the overall appearance ^_^.

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GlassShard Says: Hiya Filia-chan! Okay, for starters I see a real obvious error with your CG work. Your line drawing isn't dark enough to start with. When you first scan your art, play around with the darkness/contrast settings to make your line drawing as crisp and dark as possible. Then you won't have that nasty grayish halo around your wonderful drawing. Your composite work's pretty nice, the moon fits in with everything else well. I would just say to push your shading. You say you don't do darker shading but if you want things to really pop out and look more real, you have to go dark and go light; up the contrast in other words. You want really dark darks and really light lights all throughout your piece, especially in this particular work since you have the background so dark and Red XIII so light in front of it. It really makes Red look too flat. Also, be more specific with your shading. Put a shadow in under Red's eyebrow, his ears, and the strands of his hair. These things cast definate shadows and simply putting them in will add three-dimensionality and life to your figure (er, cat, dog, quadroped thingie). All in all though, this is a good piece o' work, don't be discouraged and keep it up!

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Ciara Covey Says: Nice job overall! I like the look of the picture with Red howling in the foreground and having the moon in the background. OoooOOo~! And the stars are spiffy! Especially how you blended them all the way across the picture, even over RedXIII. Your seem to have a good understanding of how to CG. First off it's ok if you only like using light colors to CG with ^_^ it's your style, and it adds a softer feeling to the picture. I see that because of your style, you compromised and made the background lighter, instead of it being black. Just understand that the way you use color/tones effects the appearance of the picture. In this picture, it seems like you were trying too hard to get a soft appearance. You did use light colors, but you also used large brushes. If you used smaller brushes, you can get more detail in the picture, and can still keep your style. The background you chose has A LOT of detail...I mean look at all those craters in the moon! If you made the picture of Red with more detail, then it would fit in the background better, as if it were one picture. With smaller brushes you can shade more areas in. Sometimes it is hard to CG a small picture, because you cannot fit in allot of detail. That's why you should make the picture VERY large...about 2000 pixels in width when you begin to work with it. I see that you used the blur tool around the edges so your picture would blend better with the background. Here's a tip: Before you CG, clean up your picture. Use the brightness/contrast setting (in Photoshop) to make the lines thinner/darker. This also rids the picture of smudges. To make the lines smooth, use the gaussian blur (in Photoshop again.) You have a lot of great ideas! Just work on making your pictures more detailed ^_^ Good Luck!