well its a really good pic... and cute lol

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It is not the great that are wise, nor the aged that discern judgement

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

I just noticed... Youre using gimp ^^..... omg i love GIMP

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It is not the great that are wise, nor the aged that discern judgement

lol i like it too. My friend keeps jokeing with me about it being the "poor man's photoshop" but i really like it though. it does really nicely for me.

thank you.

I saw on ~Ms-Bender's page that you wanted critiques for this, and hopefully this can help you.

The hair looks really bright, it's an unnatural color. If your hair is blonde, you would of course want to use yellow, but it's actually not yellow. You'd want to go for a more muted tone. Somewhere between yellow and orange, and closer to the greys. The shadows you'd use wouldn't be just a darker version of your main color. Think about what kind of light your character is in, and it would go off that. For example, if your character is standing outside during a sunset, all the shadows would be a dark red tint. Cold rainy day, bluish tint. To make this a bit easier, you can do all your shadows on a seperate layer in the dark red (for example) tone you picked, and then set that layer to overlay above the solid colors.

Think about the shadows that the hair would cast on the face, the chin would cast on the neck, the folds of the shirt/collar would cast. It might seem silly but an easy way to get a feel for it is if you take a photo of, for example, a shirt hanging in a certain light. And then bring it into your program of choice and just outline it, and outline all the shadows and highlights you see in it.

Also, the shadows and highlights wouldn't need to be all around every edge. Some parts might have a small highlight, some parts might have a bigger thicker one, some might not have any.

I really don't know anything about Gimp, but from what I can tell on the screen, it doesn't say anything about the size you're working in. If you aren't already, try to work big. Uneven lines and mistakes and imperfections are much easier to hide when the image is huge, as well as putting in more detail into pieces is easier when you zoom in and everything isn't pixelated. I usually start out at 5000x3000 or 9000x7000 px at 300 dpi and then make a second copy of the image to size down when I'm done with it and it's ready for uploading.

Browse through the piles of tutorials here on DA. Most of them are amazing and offer great tips. I've learned alot from them, and also from lots of practice and looking at my favorite artists work. I find that tracing really helps me. I'm not saying trace other people's work and claim it as your own, not at all. I mean if you're having trouble drawing something or seeing how the parts of it sit together, find some pictures of it that you want it to look like and trace them a few times. You'll learn the lines and curves and what meets where and have a better idea of it than by just looking. And then you will have an easier time drawing in your own way (perspective, pose, etc) by just having drawn those types of lines before.

Sorry, I wrote you an essay, but I hope you find this helpful. Best of luck!

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Oh no, this kind of comments are actually what i would like, what i was hoping for when i posted it. i love hearing what others think of my work. it really helps me to know what it is I'm doing right and what i really need to work on. thanks so much for your comment, it was really appericated.