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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balathustrius" data-source="post: 3902493" data-attributes="member: 49972">Really nice!  Great perspective on the sword, especially, and well-rendered chainmail.  I have a couple of quick nitpicks, too:The face is well done, but I think you're overemphasizing the eyes.  Just about everyone does this unless they're specifically thinking about avoiding it; it might help if you cast a shadow over the whites; due to the brows, the whites of the eyes are almost never actually white.  Also, a little touch that sometimes makes all the difference is to have the highlights reflect that color of the light being cast into them, rather than just making them stark white.  Every highlight should ideally have its own subtle color and value shift, to really give the surface the illusion of three-dimensionality.Don't be afraid to cover up detail with shadow (at least in a moody piece like this one).  I've seen some amazing artists who will render out a face in perfect detail... and then drench an entire side in shadow, to amazing effect.  In this piece, I can see that the light source is coming strongly from the right, but the shadows on the left of the figure don't seem to mirror the intensity of the light source.  For instance, his nose doesn't seem to be casting much of a shadow; this could be explained by a secondary light source or reflected light from the left, but if that's the case, it might help the painting to evidence that more strongly?One other thing; the drapery folds on the arms of his robe keep bugging me.  I think it's because the folds look a little arbitrary, and are not giving evidence to the volume of the form underneath them.  Check this out, it explains the whole science of drapery much better than I can: <a href="http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14739" target="_blank">http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14739</a>^ Awesome community for artists, btw.I really like the spectaculars on the belt, but something about them (I think the pure-white color) are making them read more as plastic and less as leather.  Like he covered his belt in ceran wrap, or something.  You might try messing with the colors a little; I have a feeling that keeping the highlights more in the brown range and using just pin-points of white at the extreme plane-shifts would remove the plastic-y feeling.That's about it.  Your drawing skills are obviously strong, and a little more practice with light will pull your paintings together beautifully.  No problem in art cannot be solved by study of the masters and working from life.  Keep at it, dude!   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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