It is hard to make art on short notice, so I appreciate that you have. Love the dynamism of his left hand!
Masque of the Red Death / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Masque of the Red Death.
I like the art, it's very expressive and makes good use of color! That being said, and maybe I'm being a bit shallow here, but the formatting really bugs me, and I think it would be much better if it were formatted differently. Novote for now, but if it changes, I may very well go back and upvote it.
Yeah, gotta agree with Spod; the formatting here is awful, and really detracts from the piece, which ends up looking like an afterthought, despite being all that there is. Novote.
spod and maxy said it all — more careful consideration of the way the art is presented would make all the difference. that said i am inclined to upvote on the strength of what you've made here. i think you could polish it just a bit more though, there are some rough lines and outlines that could stand to be tidied. again, regardless, +1.
the formatting bothers me a little, but the art appeals to me visually enough that i'll upvote this anyway. it helps that this is a favorite poe story of mine.
poet
Thank you all for the feedback, I appreciate it.
There are some things I'd like the change about my drawing, especially the right hand side of it. Whenever I get the time, I'll try to post other sketches and even the concept art as a fun "behind the scenes".
While this art is nice, I wish it came with prose. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I'd like more than that here.
-Styg
What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?
My main reason for downvoting is the lack of care for good formatting. Centering it, enlarging the piece, maybe a choice of theme, some descriptive text of your process or ruminations on the Poe piece. There's so much room here for a nice exhibition of your piece. I must echo what Maxy said about it causing the whole piece feeling like an afterthought.
The art is wonderful - you have a good sense of design, colors, and anatomy. The fixes you've made towards the image formatting have helped your piece a lot and I think adding some behind the scenes work or other info is a good idea.
My downvote; however, comes from the fact I would rather see you tell your own story about a stranger through your artwork than make an adaptation of another person's writing, especially in the context of a contest. What about this visual story is yours? Without some sort of framework, we as the audience don't know. To be clear, it is totally okay to make art/writing inspired by other sources as long as it follows our licensing rules (which your piece does). I just want to you as a storyteller to be on this page too.
This framework can be a lot of different things - have fun with it! You can do something more narrative driven, like a short paragraph that tells us about a character who found Poe's writing in the Library and decided to draw this picture and is showing it to fellow Patrons. You could do something more descriptive, such as a museum style blurb of what led you to making the design choices you did in making the characters or why you chose to illustrate this specific scene. You could turn this into a short comic. Whatever works for your storytelling style, but I would need to see something like that before I upvote.
But the time flies, irretrievable.
Definitely agree about the framework and the nature of the adaptation, but taking it as an adaptation, I dug it. Dunno if it was intentional or not, but I found the relative sketchiness of the piece to be an interesting contrast with the sometimes excruciating exactitude of the story's language ("To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite"). +1
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