Gematsu Art Contest: Sword Art Online Fanart - Asuna

Drawn By: WrittenDusk

To get things out of the way...I didn't even get into the Top 10... (T-T).

Gematsu (gematsu.com) is a great website for gaming news that I visit daily and I highly recommend it. It was really great of them for hosting this art contest, and I'd like to thank them for this opportunity.

A humbling experience is the only way I can describe this. Despite improving a lot since my first contest with Gematsu (Artwork: Sora in Advent Children Costume), there was actually less feedback during the voting this time around. 

There were multiple reasons for this which I had realized both before and during the contest.

(The second image should have been what I submitted instead.) 

I am actually really happy and satisfied with this artwork. It is probably my most detailed work to date, despite it's simplicity, haha. The details comes from the material rendering, such as the metal and types of cloth, and the realistic direction of shading. Both the atmosphere and lighting were also good. But these merits were likely also why the artwork didn't appeal to others as much.

I realized while finishing this artwork that my choice of atmosphere and lighting was disadvantageous to me. Having the light come from the back causes the front to be cast in shadows, covering most of the details. But it was too late to change it, so I committed to it nonetheless. In most cases this is already a bad choice for competitions, but especially so in my case since this artwork's highlights are in the material renderings. 

(Honestly writing this makes me feel that much more stupid, haha...)

But overall it still looked good despite the details being covered by a thin film of shadow. That is until the contest voting started. 

I already expected my image thumbnail to be small, and also knew that my artwork benefits most from being viewed at a large size; but the actual affects were beyond my expectations. This extra hit to my artwork's impression was the result of something I did without even knowing. Drawing the artwork in landscape.

I really should have known better with web page layouts; although with how my blog looks it's also not a surprise...(T-T). Portrait is favoured much more, and shows much closer to the original size.

Beyond these self reflections I have also learned and discovered other points of improvements from family critiques. One point is the pose. While the pose I chose has a great sense of movement to it, most of it lies only in the top half of Asuna's body; leaving the bottom half of her body less interesting. Which leads to the other point, which is framing and composition. If had crop the image and just have the top half, like in the second image above, it'd show much better.

I wish I could've done things differently, but I think I gained much more from losing than I would if I won. At least this time, haha.

If you've actually read all the way here, thank you so much. Hopefully this will help you in your competitions as well!