Critique?

If’ you’d like to sub­mit a paint­ing or draw­ing for pub­lic cri­tique, send me an image of it. I will either respond with an email telling you why I don’t feel com­fort­able doing a cri­tique of it, or I will post it on this site with my feed­back (with, poten­tially, thoughts from com­menters as well). I won’t be mean, but I will give my hon­est opin­ion, which some peo­ple might find painful.

A few caveats: Files should be less than 100k in size.* Make sure it’s a decent photo or scan, not one full of glare or other prob­lems. I’m not qual­i­fied to judge most abstract or polit­i­cal work. Don’t send your first ever paint­ing; do 10 or 20 or 100 more and send the best one of those. Don’t’ send joke images; I’ll only add you to my spam fil­ter. Send only one image. Send your own work. (Yes, you can prob­a­bly fool me by send­ing an image of some clas­sic but not well-known paint­ing. Big deal.) If you’re a bet­ter artist than me (and lots of peo­ple are) then I would not be the one to judge your work.

*You can find out the size by select­ing the file (click on it once) and choos­ing “Prop­er­ties” (Win­dows) or “Get info” (Mac) from the File menu. If it gives a size in megabytes (MB) the file is way too big. If you’re not sure how to make the file small enough to send con­ve­niently by email, you will need to change either the pixel dimen­sions of the image, the amount of com­pres­sion, or both. Chang­ing the num­ber of dots per inch only affects how it will print, not the file size. Try sav­ing the file in JPG for­mat if it’s not already that kind of file. If this para­graph seems like gib­ber­ish to you, find a teenager who knows about com­put­ers and ask them to make the file 100 k (kilo­bytes) or less in size.