C&C wanted layering + photography

[vagrant bloom]

My attempt at "graduating" from washes and practicing building up highlights through layering. Also mixed a little yellow into my highlight color, as I learned previously that just white gets desaturated.

Still trying to get a grasp on is where to place the highlights (right now I'm kind of assuming they belong higher up on the mini/muscles/whatever's poking out), and being braver in pushing the contrast.

Also found my wife's old Nikon d80 and was hoping to get better pics than from my phone. Still fiddling around with lighting; these pics were without additional lamps as the ones with looked overly bright/white. Maybe that can be corrected with post processing, but that's a different lesson entirely.

Thanks for your time!

[neat heart]

The pictures are perfectly fine. Color wise with brightening the highlights it depends on what look you want. While white will desaturate a little bit if you go too much yellow you may have a big hue shift from shadows to highlights, which may not necessarily be wanted. The placement of highlights will develop over time if you study any photos of people (just putting them into photo editor and make them black and white is usually good enough). Right now for the most part I would just get them all towards the top of the different volumes that you're highlighting, like the pectoral muscle lights could go higher up instead of near the bottom like that. One thing you may want to watch out for is if you highlight every individual muscle too much, you may end up with too much contrast. Here is a comparison with some orcs by Sergio Calvo to show those different areas I mentioned.