Volt's GW Art

Yes, as I said to "consider", not to accept everything face value. There's useful criticism and useless criticism, but as long as it's aiming to be constructive, it deserves a response and it gets you thinking about your own work. A little ironic, is it not, that my point was only made to highlight and elaborate on your point, for the sake of a new artist, yet you felt it was a criticism of your point and went on to defend yourself?

I could get a group of ten people I know, all with varying artistic backgrounds and we could all pass comment on one of your pictures and make constructive criticisms. All would be valid but many of them would directly contradict each other, who do you follow? Or do you decide that your style and what you wanted to create is more important? Who are you creating your art for, the audience or yourself?

The more your technique as an artist improves, the harder it becomes to sort truly useful advice from personal preferences unless you are imitating life. Your recent portrait is easy to pass constructive criticism on, we all know what he looks like and as a realistic image was your aim you have an image to reference and say X is wrong etc.

But what of your Goth girl picture? Do I make technical criticisms on skin tones, details, and lightning? Or do I take the picture as what it is and what it shows as your style because it conveys a scene and a mood admirably? You could certainly produce a "better" technical painting, you could sit down and attempt to make it look like a photograph for true realism if you really desired.

But that is a radically different painting, a different style.

If she had an arm protruding from her ear, and assuming you as an artist wanted somewhat realistic anatomy, we can feel free to pass a technical criticism, but what about the stonework above her? It certainly is but an impression of stonework, your own style comes to fore and suggests stonework from what we know of the picture but it is but a blob of colour. So where do our technical criticisms sit now?

What others say is not all that important, what you want as an artist from your work is. If you love the work of, for example, Jason Engle, and wish to reach a similar level then that is your benchmark, not some random person who has a preference for the works of Boris Vallejo.