pretty good composition

Alright, a matter of taste I suppose. I don't dither often, so I tend to overdither a lot.

And looking forward to it.

Hahaha yes I do think that was just a tad bit too much dithering when you see the rest of the super smooth gun. I'm not sure If I like the dithering as much as just lessening banding and adding a bit of glare. I understand your meaning in the light source postings, but the main problem with my poster is the fact that it is mirrored, unlike any of the posted posters. I will update soon. I'm super busy pulling together some pieces for the portfolio at the moment. I'll do what I can. Danke

I understand what you mean by my piece being a bit more cartoony; my style tends toward that spectrum. I get what you're saying about the softer, fitting roundness. In my own piece, and yours to an extent, I think that one of the detractors from that rounded feeling is the black outline; it implies hardness and solidity. A rounded edge, in my opinion, works well with a colored and shaded outline. Also, a VERY careful dithering can help produce the smoother rounder texture. One has to be careful with dithering though; one wrong step, and you can easily roughen a piece instead of smooth it. Dithering does help diffuse the highlights as if they were spread across a wider surface as they would over a smooth surface though.

To reflect these ideas, I have alterred my edit. "http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/p90-1.png". Less cartoony?

I would disagree about the lightsource still. Despite it being a poster, many posters utilize an imagined lightsource for their image. I have three examples of propaganda here to demonstrate the three main takes on poster lightsources that I've seen.

1) A way mimicing the way it is already on your piece; the light source is head on, and is often mirrored about the logo(which I would agree, this is both common and acceptable)."http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01109/1914-kitchener_1109799i.jpg" this(the one on the right, the one on the left has a directional light source from the left) is the most famous example of this variety. When the poster is actually pointing straight at the reader and the light source, it gives him extra power.

2) A technique used on many posters, although not the most common for propaganda. "http://www.diggerhistory.info/images/posters2/usa11.jpg" is an example of no light source at all. A vectored style, this is highly stylized and somewhat lacking in realism. Solid blocks of color distinguish this style. I advise against this style for this piece.

3) The third technique is a directional light source, and the light source is often not visible. "http://www.world-war-2-planes.com/images/propaganda_poster.jpg" is my strongest example; one of the most famous pieces of propaganda/motivational posters from the era, this piece is lit from the upper left of the woman, although the light source doesn't seem to exist. My argument for this one would be that it keeps the banding from occuring. I might even advise that the US Army logo itself could be the light source. Having the light coming from the logo would also draw additional attention to it, which is the intention of the poster.

Now, I actually knew that you had made the piece prior. The thing about that, for me, is that that should be even more reason for there to be no banding at all; in a standalone piece, you can pick a lightsource and go with it. The piece can continue to be alterred to fit the poster until it looks just right, so that isn't really an issue.

As for the color, I was mostly just curious, because my own research couldn't pull up the sepia-color p90. It's not a problem for you to have made it up, just a point of interest for me. The color change is for the best.

I get that the Army logo isn't a perfect color match for the true thing, and I understand the wanting to keep it as close to the original as possible, but sometimes(although not necessarily this time) it's worth trading off low-usage colors like those tin exchange for a low color count. You already have black as a color in the piece, so you can use that for most of the letters(and the contrast emboldens the logo and draws the eye too), and the background color is contrasting enough and yellow enough to take the place of the highlight.

All in all, this piece is headed in the right direction. You're welcome again, and I look forward to seeing your next update.

Wow, well thanks again! So here is what I did so far. I redid the handle and included glare on he inner parts where necessary. The shading was a poor attempt to make the appearance of the ergonomical roundness that the p90 grip has. I opted not to do as much shading as you showed because it made the feel of the picture less realistic. I loved your rendition but it seemed a bit too cartoony for the piece. The light source issue was just as you said. I did not want to reshade, as it would draw attention to a non existant lightsource outside of the piece, which, on a poster would not make any sense. The light source on a propaganda poster would be whatever the creator decided and it would most likely be mirrored toward the logo. Now here's the main thing. I premade the p90 before I had any intention of making a poster, whcih is why all the banding and look of it didn't completely match the background. It was originally black, which completely went against the deserty, aged look I was chasing. I opted to put a sepia tone on it and rework it from there. There most likely isn't a p90 with this coloring, but for the sake of the distressed, desert feel i was after, I just decided to make everything with a brown/tan tone. I also quickly tried to make th weathered look to see how it would turn out. After I found out that I did indeed like it, I decided to put a little bit more detail into it after the original piece. The reason the army logo is the color that it is, was because the logo was orinally black and gold, like the actual colors of the logo in real life. I changed the colors to a deeper brown tone to match the piece, but tried to keep the yellow and black present. Thats about all I think. I really appreciate your help!

You're quite welcome. I wanted to try to help with your banding problem, so I took a much more in-depth look. I think I found the root of that problem, but I've also seen quite a bit of other problems now, too.

But first, the banding. Turns out it's not just banding, it's full on pillowshading. More or less, a lot of the adequete-but-not-great-pixelling spots all stem from the same place as the pillowshading, and that's that you have no lightsource. Or, you do, but the lightsource is the viewer. Placing a lightsource and pixelling around that would solve a lot of the problems, especially the pillowshading. I took the liberty of making an edit of the grip, placing a lightsource for one half and hopefully showing how it alleviates the problem.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/p90.png

I did a couple of other things in the edit too. I noticed that you had a band of shadows inside the holes, which I can only assume was either an attempt at outer-AA or you trying to cast a shadow on the page beneath it to create false depth. Regardless, you picked a very harsh color to do it with. I grabbed a lighter one from the surrounding area and turned it to outer-AA and applied outer-AA to the rest of the grip too. This helps smooth the harsh black outlines into the background. Another alteration I made was I added highlight colors to the area; more accurately, I recycled other colors into highlight colors. The yellowish color from the water on the globe became the first highlight color, and I applied the highlight from other spots of the gun as the top color. I AA'd the rivet spots too, and went a degree further with making the trigger darker than the rest. I made a couple very minor lineart changes to accomodate some of the stuff better.

An issue does arise when we place a lightsource like I did: How do you mirror it and still make it believable? In most places, the answer would be "you don't mirror it, you reshade the other side to match the lightsource." However, in a poster like this, the focal point should be the US Army declaration, and it would actually make sense for both lightsources to face it.

That's all I really have on the grip right now, but there's still plenty for me to talk about. Before I move on those though, I have a question. Why choose those colors for the P90? I did a little searching and I couldn't find any p90s with such coloration. I'm just curious, because it might be worthwile to try to play around with the colors a bit(keep it low saturation to maintain the aged look).

Anyway, it wouldn't be hard to alter the US Army logo to other colors; there's no reason that it needs two unique colors. The upper-front portion of the gun, especially near the barrel, is particularly unreadable, and could do with some clarity. It has virtually no depth there.

On the topic of weathering, I'm drawing a blank. It's the partial fading of letters and images that could do it, a desaturating of color, that sort of thing. A watermark in one of the blander corners might help, if pulled off right. You should alter the light gray faded colors at the edges a bit, as it has no contrast at the moment.

Most of these are very understandable mistakes, and I'm not trying to be harsh by pointing out these flaws. I'm just hoping that this helps you out. So good luck on editing!

Thanks. I accidentally changed the width of the image while I was making it and didn't notice till now what happened. I also made the guns separately a couple months ago and couldn't figure out how to make the grip less banded. It just doesnt seem to look right.  I don't know what else to add to make it look weathered, as my attempts at water spots aren't going the way I planned. Thanks a bunch

17 colors. You have some really heavy banding around the grips on the guns. Pixels aren't perfect, but the concept of the piece is pretty neat. I really like the faded spots where it looks like it's been folded, but you don't do enough to justify them. They alone make the piece look like a propaganda flyer/poster, and if you did more to make it look like a weathered and worn piece of paper I think it would be very interesting. That would be a major reworking, but if it's for a college application portfolio I think the work would be worth it.

As it stands, the biggest thing that bugs me is that the creases aren't dead center(at least the vertical one isn't). Also, the world in the back might do well with some AA, but I'm not sure on that one. The cleaner look here might be better.