The art market’s a tough ol’ place, full of rejection and heartache. You send in your best work with the highest of hopes, and are met with “No, thanks”–or, worse still, silence. Most editors and art directors don’t give detailed critiques to unsuccessful applicants, so you’re left with nothing but questions. What was it about your art that made it unsuitable? Was it a technical problem? A matter of style? Something else entirely?
The Epilogue editors can’t answer for the entire illustration industry, of course, but we can give you a head start by letting you in on how we make our decisions. In each Ask an Editor article, one of our editors will tackle a rejected image, explaining exactly why it didn’t make the grade, and offering suggestions for improvement.
Rejected Image
This time, just to kick things off, I’m going to pick over my own work, one of my first attempts at digital art. It was not actually rejected by Epilogue, since it was done before this site came into being, but here’s what would happen if I tried to sneak it in now:
Reasons for Rejection: Unrefined or lack of detail/Objects appear flat or pasted
What It Means
This is a good example of what we’d consider borderline art. It’s got some nice qualities, such as the detailing on the leaves and the rat, but there are also some pretty conspicuous mistakes. What we’ve got to decide, when faced with a submission like this, is whether the work hangs together well enough as a whole to overlook the technical problems. Does it look good at first glance, or is the eye immediately drawn to the worst parts? Could the “mistakes” have been stylistic choices on the part of the artist? If so, are they working, or do they just look like failed realism?
Objects Appear Flat or Pasted
In this case, I can’t stop looking at the angle of the rat’s body, and wondering how on earth it could be standing that way on flat ground. Its head and shoulders are seen from directly above, but the horizon line is very low, near the bottom of the composition. In order to be standing in that position, the rat’s hindquarters would need to be levitating a couple of inches off the ground. Because of this problem with perspective, it looks like the background was completed first, and then the rat was clipped out of another painting and stuck on top. It would be possible to salvage the lovingly-rendered head by reworking the body so that the head was tucked in close to the chest, rather than stretched straight out, then lowering the curve of the back to indicate bunched shoulders. However, in order to be seeing the head from this angle, nothing behind the shoulders should be visible.
There’s another obvious reason this work is looking a bit flat: if that rat isn’t pure black, it’s very close, and it’s shaded with gray. The lighting in the background is pinkish, so the fur should be reflecting that. Even a subject that is more or less pure black, such as this rat, shouldn’t be painted that way. Pure black, gray, and white used in a realistic full-colour painting will give the impression of a hole in said painting. Some rich browns, reds, and purples mixed into the rat’s coat would make a world of difference.
Judging by the intensity of the lighting on the clouds, the foreground should also be a little more brightly illuminated. The light source seems to be somewhere almost directly overhead, maybe a little to the left, but the rat is lit mostly from the right, and the plants could be lit from anywhere at all. In order to build up shapes and forms that are convincing, the highlights and shadows need to be correctly placed, and that’s just not happening here.
