wow! you're an awesome artist! :D

Oh, I get what you're saying now. :P You might be right that it's somewhat of a typical photo pose but as far as avatars go on PJ, I don't recall seeing any in profile. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what else I would have gone with (other than the typical portriat style). And really, barring substantial stylistic embelishments, just about any situation or scene can feel like it came out of a photograph when depicted in another medium. Though, that might just be a personal kind of thing with me. :P

But yeah, I agree about the cropping actually! XD I just think this is more effective at the moment than what I had before; I'll try to think of a better way for the transiation to occur though. ;)

Sorry, no, I didn't mean tracing, not at all! Besides, if I had any doubts about that (which again I did not), a look at your gallery is enough to keep them quiet.

The meaning was, the pose you've chosen is (in my opinion) a typical photo pose, that you might not have picked otherwise. But of course, again, since you said yourself you used one, I was influenced.

This maybe was not really a specific crit for this piece, which is great, but more of a general 'stillness' feeling that I have towards some works. I would like to try and express it better, but I find I can't really.

Maybe someone else gets that feeling too and can say something more to the point?

Edit: hey, please uncrop! there's no point really...

I'll keep experimenting with the background's color transition; for now I just cropped it down.

Manupix: This wasn't traced from a Photo, if that's what you're getting at... I'm not actually sure what you're getting at if not that. :P It would have been a LOT easier to trace from a photo and while it is accepted into the gallery around here (usually), most people aren't impressed by that. So I just made it from scratch in paint (which was a little easier with my duel monitor set up). Didn't keep anything for a worthy WIP process show though really. :\

Onek: I think the Green shade does work well there, but I don't know if I can shoehorn that into the rest of the image. I'd like to keep the background colors to what's being use in the positive space.

 The DOF effect in the background is nice

Something undefined in the mouth?

Great light and colors.

I generally have a problem with art made from photos: it's instantly noticeable (OK, I cheat, you wrote about it, but still), and there's something missing, or unbalanced. Maybe it's something like this. Perception is not an instant thing, it's an integrated experience, from several / all senses, filtered by memory, attention, emotion, and other stuff.

A photo is a copy of a point in spacetime: it just has nothing to do with how we see. And it's all the more so with photos of people: there are so many specialized  layers of perception at work to build an image of people in our mind. This is probably also why photos often 'don't look like' people.

 The hair is AH-MAZING.

pretty neat! like it, but im not sure about the transition too, yellow and blue make green, so u should use green as transition color, ...

maybe like >THIS< , .....didnt use colors from ur palette, but im sure u can somehow manage this, i think u can even get rid of some colors