I feel like my art is smeared?

[ancient cobalt]

This is kinda weird but I think my art lacks a sort of distinction with it's blurred edges and it's solid edges

I don't know if it's just poor color choices or my brush but it doesn't look as good as I want it to

Looking at it now see now my colors can be better,they kinda see a bit eh

It might be a bit of that and no solid edges

[hot coral]

I don't see anything wrong with the way the color is? It looks nice, are you saying it looks boring?

[ancient cobalt]

I feel it can still be better

or more than it currently is

I refuse to believe that my color choices are as good as they can possibly be

[hot coral]

Color is more of a style choice . And yours looks nice and appealing. The background could use work. Or you could make your colors have more contrast
For the background you could go with a shape instead of just a simple color. Or a gradient .

Maybe add in chromatic aberrationeffects clothing texture effects

Here the subject looks cute. But adding a spotlight over her head and darken the background and maybe add glow to her eyes and suddenly you changed the time to a more spooky vibe

[ancient cobalt]

I probably shouldve done more about the background, youre right about that

I was experimenting with seeing how it'd look being a solid color thats the same as the highlights

that was my thought process anyways

I see a lot of art from artists like LAM that do something like that and I took inspiration from that

[hot coral]

Oh LAM is a nice choice. But if you notice their artwork has a lot of extra little stuff. Even when the background is simple the character has extra stuff, like flowers or objects laying around , hair has multiple colors, sometimes the clothing has a lot of little detail while still keeping the color simple

. Maybe an outline around the character can help her pop out

[ancient cobalt]

Im honestly at a loss at what to do

[sick parrot]

your colour choices in this seem very unified and there’s not much overall contrast or complimentary colours going on, which might be a part of the reason why you feel it lacks definition. the lighting is also very neutral and doesn’t provide much visual contrast on the subject. the painting job with your soft and hard edges could be improved but I don’t think it matters as much here

Lam tends to use very high contrast colours or lighting which is what makes their art really pop, and they use complimentary accents of colours in shading or lighting sometimes
It’s really just since in this specific drawing the colours don’t have much diversity except for pink and black and the lighting isn’t very high contrast nor defined

the only pop or compliment of a colour other than the main colours of black or pink is a bit of yellow in her eyes which is still pretty close in the colour wheel relative to pink, so it doesn’t exactly help provide much contrast either

simple and confined colour schemes can work if your comp work/lighting and handling of the colours is meticulous but otherwise it might be easy for it to fall flat

[sick parrot]

Sorry if u don’t really care abt the colours tho lmao i can do a mock up of how I would paint and adjust the soft and hard edges of your drawing but I don’t think there’s much of a problem with your painting

[ancient cobalt]

It doesn't matter much to me if the the problem is the edges, colors, or something else entirely.

I want to be better

It might be good for me to see how it should be, so I can understand and apply that later

I mightcd been focused on the wrong things it seems

[sick parrot]

once I wake up tomorrow I’ll help draw up an alternate version for you!

[ancient cobalt]

I appreciate that, genuinely

[hollow lion]

Hii! Cute drawing! I feel like you have these cute elements, but they are kind of hidden. Like the black nail polish is hard to see, cus its so close to the black eyelashes (and if I did that hand pose I would either be poking my eye or have a finger blocking the side of my vision😅 ).
As for color I would add more color values (dark/light), so it wont seem that flat. Hope it helps, and keep it up!

O shoot, a random red dot appeared wops 😅

[novel adder]

Biggest thing im seeing is that the skin looks inconsistent with how everything else is colored. Also the pink hair streaks dont have and shading

[ancient cobalt]

Oh wow that's totally different

I'm curious thoughm how do you pick those colors without them looking too strong?

Because in my eyes when picking colors, those dark darks are a little too strong when I choose them. I can't get them to look right

Unless I'm thinking about them completely wrong

[hollow lion]

I use sliders to help me.
So some color knowledge in softwares would be that there's 2 things you can think of when adjusting color. Saturation and Black/White (Brightness). If you only want darker color, but do not wish to touch the amount of color vibrancy, then I would only slide the B-part. And if that becomes to muddy, I would add some vibrancy (Im not home atm, so this is on phone)

[ancient cobalt]

Makes sense