Oh. My. Gosh. Dodge, thank you so much for your detailed and oh-so-complimentary testimonial. It’s my turn to be blown away!

Sometimes I hit peaks in my drawing and the only thing that can help me move forward is a serious focus on improvement. My usual go-to is watching video lessons or searching for tutorials, but there comes a point that they just don’t work anymore. So, hoping to take the push for improvement to the next level, I searched for critique services online and came across a few pages including Gail’s.

I emailed all of them, but most of them I felt a sort of reluctant due to their attitude, most of them quite pretentious, making me feel they would treat the service as a way of showing how to strive to be like them, more so than expand the craft. Gail’s was by far the most attractive. Passionate, drawing because she loves to draw, and helping others learn to enjoy the craft. So my fingers were crossed, but knowing her specialty is pastels, I was prepared to very understandably search elsewhere since my work is entirely digital, and the project I am working on is only a draft, AND it’s a comic. I’d have found it perfectly reasonable to receive no for an answer, but that was not the case! After discussing it in a few emails, I was excited to place my order for the video critique service.

Only days later, I was blown away by the quality of the video. A very short wait, and on top of that, the video was precisely what I was hoping for. I had inklings of where my project was maybe falling short, and she did address those exact things, but there were many other parts I was entirely unaware of, that when pointed out, just made so much sense as to why changing them would significantly improve the project.

Gail is clearly a very talented person, both technically and creatively. I’m extremely grateful she accepted my project for critique and I very much appreciate the quality advice that came from it.

I highly encourage anyone else reading this to give the service a try. I look forward to coming back myself.

A big thank you to Gail!

Dodge

Denise that’s fantastic!! Look forward to helping you on your painting journey 😀

Thank you so much for your detailed critiques. I appreciate that you upload my painting in a software and then show me the exact areas and how to improve it visually. That helps much more than just verbal suggestions.

So far I had tried one landscape piece and one portrait piece. I was struggling more with the landscape one; you had made good suggestion in darkening the value in a sunset scene, and that I should have paid attention to the shadow when I changed the composition of the light source. For the second portrait piece, I was quite content with it to start with but I was glad that you pinpointed one relatively weaker area. It had bothered me a bit but I didn’t pay too much attention to it. To resolve that, I changed the shape of the plant to make it more abstract even though I did not eliminate it as suggested.

It was helpful to know what you think the strengths and the weaknesses are in my paintings and especially helpful when you guided me visually in how to resolve them. I look forward to more critiques in 2017:).

Warmly,
Susan Lee

Thank you, thank you, thank you for deciding to offer a critique service. I’ve admired your How To Pastel website with all your valuable tips, your art history reviews and your monthly artist choices to consider and enjoy. You are a knowledgeable wordsmith when it comes to explaining what’s going on in an artwork both historical and contemporary.

So, of course I wanted you to critique some of my work. I wanted to ask you to be my “second set of eyes” and help me through some of my uncertainty.

I chose three of my recent landscape pieces, one that I thought successful and liked and two that I wasn’t at all sure about. I emailed a photo of each for your critique and anxiously awaited your reply. What a surprise! it was not the few paragraphs I expected, it was a private video prepared just for me.

The first video was on the piece I thought successful. You liked it too but found a few places that could be better with adjustments. You were right on target, the areas you suggested were the very same spots that I anguished over not only during the work but also afterwards. Your suggestions helped me to re-evaluate my work and guided me to a more cohesive finish that I could feel comfortable with.

The video critiques of my second two paintings were high on the learning curve. Wow, Did you open my eyes! You showed me how to crop to make my work more exciting. By changing the format through cropping, the focal point and subject matter became distinctly different. Why hadn’t I thought of that? This is where your keen appraisal was such a help to me.

Your critiques have given me so much to think about when evaluating my work. It is comforting to know you are there as a “second set of eyes” when struggling to be objective. Thank you for adding this valuable service for artists.

Warmly,
Gailen Lovett