Reviewing an old Drawing

 

This piece which I had done at around mid-2018 used to be one of my favorites during high school, but nowadays it doesn't appear that well done to me. The Heavy use of of figures in a variety of poses seems to be the only thing which I still enjoy about the artwork as having so many people/characters on one canvas is a foreign concept to me nowadays. 

I remember originally getting the idea of adding friends from school along with a few fictional characters in the style of a video game poster on the bus ride to home. It was the first instance of me creating a large project in ibis Paint X on my iPhone only using my finger to draw (a practice that I still use to this day). Though the means of drawing remained the same, the techniques used were very different from what I'm comfortable with now. Each figure is drawn in a very simple way which doesn't make way for many details, or uniqueness between each person. This is especially true for the clothes they're wearing as the majority of the figures are wearing the most basic articles of clothing with very saturated and and boring color schemes.

The largest gripe I have with not only this piece, but many others of mine from around the same period was the strategy I used for shading. That being the use of black to demonstrate shadows. Shading should really be done with a similar color to what's being darkened, as in real-life shadows aren't just black spots that make things appear darker. The use of a slightly transparent black makes the figures look very muddy and unrealistic. I'm glad that I've been able to evolve my artistic skills to be able to point out these flaws.