hey thx for the great comment, and yes i also not loved all the parts and i agree in a lot of things with you
and i will remember it, i will try to work on it next time, and yea i did it from a photo and tried to make it
identical to there so it came out a little strange, and i did the dithering all myself and just tried to fill a big area
i will keep working on more small canvases and yes the text is posted, not painted :]
Naama is "a face" in finnish :) Why are there white pixels spread around the text ;o?
Last time I try and spell check... damn thing didn't post when I pasted it in the box. Now I gotta transcribe it.
Well, a noticeable problem is that the text isn't AA'd to a pink background; it was typed, then copy and pasted from a white background. To put it on the gallery, you outta do the AA/text by hand yourself.
In general, I really think the contrast on the whole piece is just way too low. This makes areas in the face and the hair look kind of "mushy" and it isn't too flattering a depiction. The areas like the eyes and the mouth, since they have a high contrast outline, also hurt with the low contrast shading.
The hair seems to be done in a way that kind of makes it look like... I guess something that looks like it came out of a can, and was sparyed on a head. I'm not trying to be insulting when I say that, but it doesn't really flow like hair (of course, for all I know, that could be very accurate to her hair; we would need a ref to really give better crits). It seems like there's a few clumps of hair that make up her scalp, and each one is kind of effected by a light source in its own way. It might be better to look at the hair as one object, comprised of man, as opposed to several composed to one. Honestly, it's hard to say for sure since there isn't a reference to go by.
There's also a LOT of dirty looking dithering all in the hair, and around the face; it tends to make it look like a lot of the work was done with color reduction to an extent (perhaps from a "CG'd" piece), or that the dithering was done technically and not by hand. I personally think that dithering can be tricky business when doing a portrait; it's easy to unintentionally show an un-natural texture with it, and this is especially worth looking out for when it's a girl's portrait being worked on.
I'd also suggest using a reference with a more distinct light source next time; it looks like this picture was taken with a lot of lights in different places, and when you work off that, it can be difficult to define things according to shadows.
This isn't too bad after a 3 year break thoughl; there's just carious areas that could be done more effectively.
83 colours?