Car Slide

Sometimes it's easiest to critique and be critiqued by strangers. Also, I've seen that you've submitted this to our May 2010 gallery at #Dazzled. While we have a gallery specifically for the artworks the artists would like us to critique, I wanted to critique this anyway. So let's see how this goes.

First of all, I'll let you know now that I've never played Mirror's Edge but I have seen the case and that alone nabs my attention. For the game to have had THIS kind of impact on you to create such wonderful fan art, it must truly rock!

I'll start with the negative, as I find is usually best to do, so the critique can end on a happy note.

I really only have three quarrels with this piece and honestly, they're pretty minor.

First: You have great use of the shadows here, but I have to say this - Even light leaves shadow. In other words, the discharge from her gun should be leaving a faint shadow, I would think. See? Minor.

Second: I'm not too sure about the blur effect... and by that I mean the camera movement it suggests may be a tad off. The Character seems to blur in places that suggest she's moving into the center of the hood, rather than back and away from her assailant, but that seems to be a side-effect of the central focus. You truly do get the feeling that the car is still coming at you, full force.

Third: Eh, this one's extremely minor, but I'll make reference to such things as movie posters as an example. When a movie poster tries to catch your attention with an action shot, they try to make sure no goofy faces are made in the shot... and the way her overbite looks here reminds me a bit of a cheezy 80s movie I just watched the other day, called "No Retreat, No Surrender 2" in which the main character, a martial artist, would look buck-toothed when in a position of extreme strain. I wound up calling him "The Ninja Chipmunk". Now, she's no where near as extreme as he was, but the form of the mouth tells me she's really focused on her shot, but I think we all know, since she just slid off the hood of the car, it's pretty much covering fire. Firing an accurate shot in this condition is next to impossible.

And now for the good.

The driver's expression, what you can see of it, anyway, is priceless! Bewilderment coupled with horror, I love it! "I just ran her over, and she just killed that guy! And she's still going!" hehe.

I love the detail on the car. While I hate white as a car color, it allows detail to be spotted. Such as the peeling paint above the passenger side headlight. Very nice. In fact, that headlight is imperfect enough, one could think that she was "hit" by the car there and proceeded to slide.

Her pose is perfect. I love it. It screams "Parkourt" to me. Which is what Mirror's Edge is, is it not? A lot of running and jumping from place to place, using whatever surface you can? She looks as though she anticipated having to slide across the car so well in advance that she was able to look and fire behind her.

While the camera angle and view don't allow for much other than her and the car to be seen, you don't need any more than that to know what's going on here. Someone's in hot pursuit of her and she's trying to cover herself.

All in all, a beautiful piece, and I'd like to thank you for letting us showcase it in #Dazzled's May 2010 gallery <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)"/> Keep up the great work and stay creative!