Back in the day, I remember you used to have such a problem with faces. Not drawing them anatomically correct, mind you, they just had a bad habit of all looking the same when you weren't doing a portrait of an actual person and were just drawing from memory. Faces are a sonuvabitch to get right; once your able to draw a type of face right, it's almost like you have to learn how to draw it all over again just to make a distinctly different one. It's tempting to keep doing the same types of faces you know over and again and never learning how to branch out. I don't know why it is, but I find this is a big problem with East-Asian artists (not talking about all the animu artists or cartoonist, which is a generic, rinse-and-repeat beast all on its own. I mean legit Asian digital artist).



The last year it looks like you've been breaking out of that mold. This new Cyberpunk IP of yours looks like it's really making you branch out and expand into territory you've not previously explored in your work; not just the faces, but the way you approach drawing machines, the use of lighting effects, the types of composition you use. Even if, for whatever reason, this IP of yours flops or you discontinue it, I think it's forever altering the way you approach art, and for the better. I've been following your art since the kombat-unit days, and I gotta say, you've changed a lot as an artist from the days when you would spam Warhammer fan art and post essay long comments about how you longed for nuclear holocaust.



Anyway, now that that's out, what I'm liking most about this IP of yours is the way you use color. It's impressive how you use such a wide range of high-saturation colors and still manage to maintain such a gritty feel. Not easy, I can tell you. The green bottle and the blue computer screens stand out the most in particular. I like the green beer-thing, it draws the eyes to it, which is good because it helps establish what kind of place he's in and the tone of the atmosphere. The blue, I'm not so sure. The contrast of blue on yellow make it heavily eye-catching, yes, but I don't really see the need to focus the eye of the door frame there. Nothing is really accomplished by that so as far as I can tell.



Other issue I had; I'm not feeling the composition of the characters. There's a lot of open space above the guy's head filled with some neon light things, but nothing else. The simplicity of ceiling is really throwing off the balance of the bottom half of the picture, which is filled with heavily detailed characters. Also, the black just looks kind of out-of place; it contrasts heavily with the yellow background, which, once again, draws the eyes to it for no real reason. That's the danger of using high-contrasting colors; you have to be constantly aware what you're trying to draw the viewer's eyes to, and how misplacing even a tiny amount of contrasting color can pull them away from what they should be focusing on. If you asked me, since the ceiling is unimportant, I would have made it yellow like the background, or at least something that's not so radically contrasting the background that it becomes attention-demanding.



On the plus note, character costume designs are excellent. I am very much a fan of how clothing and machine parts look "patched-together" from tons of smaller pieces. It make everything look overly-complex, but still focus more on practicality than beauty or art; that's a real Cyberpunk look if ever there was one. I like the idea of how they use colors and neon lights as their form of art and beauty, rather than pictures or patterns. S'cool man.