Right, this will be a bit different, but I hope what I say comes across as having come from a good place. You know what the issue has become, looking at your artwork? It's impossible to critique now, though technically speaking that's neither good nor bad.



Hear me out. You need to do something totally goddamn different to what you normally do if you want to add something new to your art. I'm not saying it isn't good, far from it. You've clearly hit a niche and a style and honed it to absolute perfection, beautifully, but now it's starting to exist in it's own universe stylistically.



The colouring style, lineowrk, your use of lighting, your creature and character design, these are all elements that one can identify immediately when somebody looks at your artwork. This is by no means a bad thing. This makes you immediately identifiable as an artist. But your style, whilst having been honed, is unchanging.



I mean, it's not a critique on this piece at all, it's beautiful like the rest, but I just keep thinking to myself:



'What if the dude just decided to try someting like mostly matte-black and used just the tiniest hints of lighting to identify shapes? How would he interpret the subtle colours then?'



'How would the vibrant colours work in a more mundane and much more photo-realistic setting?'



'How would his understanding of light, tone and rendering work if he was stuck doing just a black and white linocut?'



I'm not saying regress, not at all, there's a clear line of development in this style of yours going from 'We Are Legion' and 'Connected' and such all the way up to where you are now, but I'm curious to see more artwork where you've taken what you've learnt over the years and put them in radically different thematic/visual contexts to what you normally do. I think your technical proficiency demands it a little.



Actually I started writing this a few minutes before you submitted Battle Damage. Those two are kind of in the realm of what I'm talking about. Those are really awesome. XD