Junior Graphics Designers

AfterShock: You have a good eye for composition. Liberty is gorgeous! However, blending and colour balance need a little work in your images. In grass, you can mask or erase the horse's hooves with a grass brush rather than cloning over them and getting messy repetition. In Sunset, none of the background tones have been introduced to the horse and the lighting, while a great idea, doesn't match the lighting on the horse at all. Picking stock where the lighting matches, or mostly matches, makes it a lot easier to lightly dodge and burn the horse into fitting (if needed). You can easily use Color Balance to take down the cyan in the horse and introduce some reds and yellows. Try using blending modes to make your text blend into the scene more cohesively. You can get more of a taper to your hair strands using this tutorial.

Escapist: You're good at matching up angles with your stock choice. Despite this, the horses still don't look like they belong because the colours don't fit. Identify the colours in the background and introduce them into the horse using the Color Balance function. You'll notice that your horse belongs much better in the background after! Try burning the bottoms of the horses' hooves to make them seem more at home on the ground. Be sure to touch up your cutting where there are lines of colour from the previous background. A handy way to do this is to lock the transparent pixels of the layer and go over the edge with a small fuzzy clone brush. Try making your text less opaque and dominating using blending modes (and smaller text sizes). Careful not to use fonts like Papyrus, they're considered tacky by graphics designers.

Shakti: You've got the skills, but not the stock credits! You are using stock images, right? Watch your contrast balance, in Mithras's image (which I think is great) the horse has less contrast than the background as evidenced by fewer dark tones. In Kane's image the rocks could use some more contrast and a touch of red to fit with the horse. I recommend getting a deviantART account for sharing your work, since it opens you up to using more of the stock images offered there. You can always disable comments if you're not a fan of the community on there. I'd like to have you on the team, but without stock credits my hands are tied.

Sin: Your manes and tails have gotten so good lately! Your blending skills are looking pretty solid too. Your background work is pretty freakin' seamless; it rocks. Make sure to balance your shadow and highlight levels in all aspects of an image (markings especially) and you shouldn't have much trouble. Welcome to the Graphics team!

Zen: I see a great base of skills here! Your hair layering is very nice, I like the way you use your shadows and highlights to give it dimension. Your brush strokes look good.

I recommend avoiding true greys in black hair, since it'll usually have a bit of blue or yellow in it depending on the lighting of the horse (and, if there's a background, those colours will need to be added to both horse and hair, however subtly). Picking your shadow, midtone and highlight colours from the body of the horse with the eyedropper can help. Same with white hair; you can err on the side of cream tones while still using a cold enough highlight colour to give it the appearance of being true white.

I thiiiink you oversmudge your bodies a bit. Not always, but sometimes. The first speckled Natural brush tends to work well for me on about 15% strength, depending on the size of the stock.

Your work with backgrounds shows a lack of experience working with them, but it's hardly your fault that's not often called for on CI. I think with a little practice you'll get a handle on colour balancing your subject to fit the background, as well as matching the angles of your stock and hoof blending and all that jazz. Picking the right stock can save you a world of trouble, so don't worry about taking a while to find what works best.

You're a bit of an anomaly, being stronger in the skills people tend to develop later and still green in balancing and blending the subject. It's really fascinating! I'm a bit jealous; I think you're more comfortable with your tablet than I am with mine.

Once you can comfortably ground your subject, you can start focusing more on lighting direction, varying the flow of your hair more (I'll admit I am the worst at this - my hand just wants to draw all the hairs in the same shape) and doing epic-level splashes, rippled reflections and all sorts of ninja stuff.

You have a metric buttload of potential (ahem) and I'm excited to see what you can do.

Welcome to the Junior Graphics team!