Magnel's Portfolio

[Magnel]

So this is a temporary website I have set up until I finish my big one. It just like everything else in my life is a work in progress, but it gets the job done.

This would be the link to that particular site.


--Wade

[Talon]

It's not too bad a site. Needs contact details prominently displayed somewhere (i.e. email). As a more minor style crit - try and unify the font face and sizes that you use. Currently there's 3 different ones on your site. Aim to keep it one font for headers/menus and one for content text.

As for the content, I think you need to work on your lighting and anatomy. Everything just now has very soft, uniformly rounded shading, which takes any sort of contrast and form definition out of your concepts. A lot of it looks as if it's sketched in using small, soft brushes without much of a base. Try blocking out shapes in a base colour using a solid, hard brush and then roughing in the lighting with much larger and harsher brushes than you're currently using. Then you can go back and refine it and do detail passes (it looks sort of like you're jumping straight to the detail pass first).

Have a look at these;

PSG Art tutorial
Light Tutorial - Part 1: The basics

[Magnel]

Thanks for the links, and about the text, that's one thing I have problem with, I find a good font, and by the time I start on another page, I've done forgot what font I was using and forget to look back.

The thing is, most of those works currently up are for a team I'm working with, and that's how the client likes the work, he prefers to see quick details, but not going to crazy, and I get it done a lot faster by working that way.

Since I just got this new computer this past two weeks, I haven't done much that isn't for that particular client, but yea I do know all about the blocking colors and all that dandy stuff.

But thanks again, I def. liked how saturation was explained in the first tutorial, something I've always had trouble with, especially with skin tones.

--Wade

[Talon]

When choosing a font, you have to use something that everyone has on their PC. So generally you want something clean and easy to read which means you've really got a choice of Arial or Verdana (or Times New Roman if you like - but it's hard to pull off). If you use a font you have installed on your PC and the viewer doesn't - they can't see it.

Then you specify the font to be "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif". That tells it to be Arial first and it'll fall back through the list if the user doesn't have that font. So anyone without Arial gets Helvetica (i.e. mac users) and if neither of those are available, it defaults to whatever their browser's default sans-serif font is).

Also, if you use a cascading style sheet (CSS), you only need to define the font that's used once then reference the stylesheet into each html page. Then all you need to do is edit that one CSS file and you can alter the font used on your entire website, propagating through every page that references the CSS file. You can define the look of your entire site in that one file, making it really easy to make adjustments to the style and layout of your site with very little effort.

[Magnel]

Thanks for telling me this, good learning experience

I am building my actual (it's a WIP, it's more than a portfolio, it's got some other crap) portfolio with css with Evrsoft building software. What I'm using now is just drag and drop crap I found for free

Thanks again!

--Wade