sumguy720's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Matter Morph]

Fantastic!

Oh man this is sweet. It reminds me of a quasar jet punching a hole through interstellar gas. I think it would be better if you gave the long streamlike part a little more definition from the gas cloud, but other than that I think you did a great job. What did you make this in?

Kaze666x responds:

I made it in Photoshop CS3

[Self Portrait - S.A. Style]

Sweet

That's very good! I like the style, and the piece is very clean. The shading is minimalistic, yet effective, and the expression on the character's face is very telling! The image as a whole, however, is kind of drab. This would be an amazing complement to a dialog or a storyline, but by itself it doesn't really hold attention, which is probably inherent in the webcomic style.
So 10/10 because I think the fact that its from a webcomic offsets the fact that it isn't attention grabbing.

Plette responds:

Thanks for the detailed critique; that kind of insight is always welcome! ^_^

And yeah, on it's own it's kinda dull, I totally agree. This was more about trying to get that sort of greyscale coloring technique down, as I've seen it used very effectively (Everafter at Snafu Comics is a great example).

Granted, this pic is hardly as action intensive as Everafter... so yeah. Pretty dull lol

[TriFlame]

Awesome

Wow that's great! I've been trying to master this kind of abstract art-- what did you use to make it? There's a great sense of motion here, and the particles are very nice, crisply defined, and organized to boot.
If you have any tips I'd be more than receptive to them.

EchoRun responds:

Apophysis is the program I use for this. It is free to download and use - just google it. :)

It is basicly a flame generator that uses maths to create images, like a very complicated chart - you just put the variables in, move stuff around, pick colours and it creates the image. There are plenty of tutorials and guides for beginners to use, or you can just play with the random stuff it generates.

[Ravged Soul]

Good planets

This is pretty cool, but something that would make it cooler is a much darker shadow.
Take a look at this picture of mars:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0312/mars5p5_esa_full.jpg
See how it's almost completely black where the sun don't shine? I think your cool molten scar would pop out twice as much if you made the planet almost disappear into the darkness of space on that bottom right edge.
Also, some mountains or craters in the larger planet would definitely add a touch of coolness.
The stars are a little neglected here too, what you should keep in mind is that there are millions of different stars of varying brightness in any particular direction in space. Perhaps if you added some light and dark gray pixels instead of only white ones for the stars, you'd have a better balance between foreground and background.
And, I don't mean to take my constructive criticism too far, but a lens flare on the sun would be awesome. I know that's really hard to do with pixel art, but it would be kick ass nonetheless.
Good drawing. I liked the debris between the two planets-- but the magma was my favorite.

pbjplatypus responds:

First off, thanks for the review! It's great to hear from the more experienced.
Ah, yes, I see what you mean about the shadow! That's certainly something to keep in mind, especially because I'm too lazy to go and fix this one. As for the mountain and/or crater idea, I tried that and failed massively when trying to do that. On the stars, I had no idea that a noise field could be used back when I made this.

Holy crap I wish i could do lens flare like that. . . That would look kick ass, you're right.

(And can you believe that the magma was actually an after thought after grabbing the wrong color from my palette?)