WOW!! That's amazing! Thank you!

@Tarek Khazendar This is awesome! There’s a lot of things I like about your piece: the line-up composition; the posing of the characters; how the bone anatomy maintains the uniqueness of each character design (the little guy with a floating ribcage is so fun); the X-Ray look, which is eye-catching and nicely painted. Very good job adapting the 2D-flat original designs into this 3D anatomy-focused take. Really cool work, Tarek. Thank you for joining and congrats!

Love the glow effect!

Wow, that glow looks great. Love the variety of characters.

This rocks! Not sure how you did this but it looks like quality level of a Pixar movie screen capture! Excelsior!

Wow, this looks amazing!

Whoa, Tarek, this looks so professional, I love the x-ray style, and the characters look great!

Thanks for the suggestion @Stephen Bauman. I took your advice and darkened the background a tad more and it definitely made the lights on the torso pop more. Here's the final.

If I consider that you would like to emphasize the sweeping top-left to bottom-right gesture of the torso/front leg I would experiment with darkening 4 areas/shapes. The background behind the face, the arm (furthest back), and the leg (also furthest back) and also the light shape of the face/head. The bright light behind the face draws attention to the high contrast edge between the beard/face and the light in the background. Also, I think it's really cool to take your artistic license to frame the figure best by changing the value of the background in a few places- with that in mind I would also darken slightly the back arm & leg so that the highest key shape is a literal diagonal from top left shoulder the bottom right knee. This, of course, is just in the spirit of optimization and while it might improve the attention to the focal point it also has the potential to over-streamline the composition.

I like your value composition very much, it gives the figure a dramatic effect. :)

Hmmm. Thank you for the question and being a great role model, Stan! I’ve only been doing the value comp studies since that wonderful recent episode of Draftsmen, and since I’m new at it, I’ve only been doing 2 value, only black or white. I haven’t been looking at three values yet at all, so please take this with a pinch of salt 😅. You definitely got a sweeping feel directing the eye along the torso with that curvy diagonal black, and I think it’s really interesting how you’ve brought the light in behind your figure. In your reference photo, I’m feeling a lot of force in the model's right arm, without it he falls over. In your final abstracted study far right, that arm disappears into the darkness completely, and so my brain is trying to stabilize the figure, and thinks the long white swoop is his right arm resting on his leg in a very stable, static pose. Really looking forward to seeing how you develop this and where you go with it!

Very interesting! I looked immediately at the more abstract study first. Next, Comparing that abstract literally to photo and I didn’t see a match of the large lights and dark background areas framing his face and limbs. Then i looked at painterly grayscale study and realized you are planning (composing!) some creative invented lighting in background. Now comparing the abstract study to the painterly grayscale, the abstract version makes perfect sense, very cool

This is beautiful Stan, it almost looks like you're flagging (or moving) the light source in your studies to deliberately push the model's right arm into the shadows and illuminate directly behind him. If the light is a bit more ambient, it's possible the chin wouldn't completely fall into the shadows, and you'd have a bit more clarity there. That said, there is a neat repeating shape with the torso and the chin, so it looks rad. Anyway, this appeared as a notification on my desktop, which is great to know the site is working! So, hope I'm not stepping on toes. Good luck with the value comps today!

I love both, but I do prefer Sargent's simplicity