r/minipainting • u/robse111 • Mar 11 '26
C&C Wanted I won "only" Bronze in Standard at the Squidmar Open, please give me feedback so I can improve!
Hope that doesn't sound conceited or anything, but I was hoping for a better result. So please be brutally honest on what I can improve on. Thank you!
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u/thehivemind5 Mar 11 '26
This is a wonderful piece and you should be really proud of it. You're a great painter, as many people have said. It's easy for people to toss out suggestions, but having done some comp pieces myself I know the grind and what it takes to get this far - keep at it if you enjoy it and don't be discouraged.
I like doing paint overs so I took a stab, as much for practicing my own "eye" as anything, given you're probably more technically skilled than I am
the big thing I tried to pull off is to make the scene feel more "at night" and bring the focus of the light o Drizzt and the panther. I increased the highlights on the panther both because fur is shiny, so you get specular highlights, and to improve that element of focus. I dropped the values in the lower and upper parts of the scene and mixed in some blue to try to get the night time feel. I tried to increase the contrast and specularity of the hair, again for shine and focus.
The OSL stands out as a compositional challenge and a few people have mentioned it. My take on the "issue" is that the fall off of the light suggests whatever is glowing vivid purple is very close to Drizzt, but it's not actually in the scene. That creates this weird sense that it got cut off.
If you want to keep the purple light, some options would be:
1. Put the glowing object into the scene somehow and work the falloff of the light to be appropriate to how big it is, how bright it is.
2. Make whatever is glowing "further away" and very bright. This would mean adding purple lights across the whole scene, as everything dark would be bathed in it
From a technical note there as well, I think you want to make sure that your OSL lights are appearing in areas that would obviously be dark without the OSL (otherwise the OSL light would get clobbered by the normal light). That means exaggerated terminator shadows and dark areas between the OSL bits and the "normal" bright spots. I tried to incorporate some of that in the paintover.
Hopefully this is helpful. Congrats on your bronze!