The Blade Itself character concept art - critique on coloring and shading greatly appreciated

[Arina]

Hi everybody,
I'm working on a project where I create character concept art for the fantasy novel "The Blade Itself" by Joe Abercrombie. Next to improving my anatomy drawing skills I also want to focus on improving my understanding of color and lightng. Usually when I draw characters I only do the lineart and stop there because I'm too lazy to add color and it never really turns out the way I want to . So now I'm trying to challenge myself.

If you have any tips of how I can improve the coloring and shading in my designs and how to make them look more interesting, I will be really thankful if you would share your knowledge . Feedback on anatomy is also appreciated.

I will post more and more paintings and drawings in the upcoming weeks so stay tuned

[Arina]

First character I painted, "Logen Ninefingers", a depressed barbarian who believes his family and friends to be dead and his only objective at the moment is staying alive.

[achronic]

Hey! Cool concept Poor guy tho!

So I changed a few things. In the picture above, the proportions were kinda wrong, so I changed things up a bit. Mainly the head placement and neck area. I think you originally wanted to make it look like a thick jacket, or that he was very muscular, but I didn't realise this until I had already finished the paintover--Either way, it wasn't reading very well. Besides proportions, I slightly changed his skin colour to a more realistic mixture (More saturated mids). I kind of changed his pose as well, trying to bend him a bit, as he was very stiff previously. I also changed his left foot, as it previously looked like it was both resting/was grounded, and looked like he was about to take a step. So I enhanced the "step" by moving his leg a little, so that it would be readable. I changed his arm slightly too. As for lighting, I made key areas lighter, such as his face, body, so it would bring more attention to him. I also made the shadows between the arms/cloak harder, so that it would be easier to see the arms, as they previously almost merged into the darkness around his cloak.

I moved his axe some, tilted it downwards and made it bigger to compensate, also to make it even more readable, as it was quite small before. Lastly, I defined his neck area some. Anyway, I hope this was helpful! Good job on the character, he looks awesome

[enalya]

@achronic you ace all the crits man, I see you everywhere I can't add anything to this!

[achronic]

@enalya Haha, thank you. It's nice to see other crits, such as yours though, its helpful to see what I missed and there is a lot to learn from them!

[Arina]

@achronic Thanks a lot for your feedback and the time you took to do the paintover! I definitely like the changes that you did to the colors. Mine had way too little saturation and contrast. Although I agree that some proportions in my version are a bit off I think that he almost looks a bit too scrawny in your paintover :D..he's supposed to look big and tough. So I will see what I'll do about that. Maybe it'll be enough to just make his head a bit bigger...
Again, thank you very much :)!

[Arina]

It took me a while, but here is another character I finished. Her name is Ferro Maljinn, a fighter, murderer and thief, who wants vengeance for having been enslaved during the war.
Again, I'd be very greatful for constructive feedback!