Have you ever looked at WIPs, or even finished projects, where the authro obviously is proud enough to post, and you take account of experience whilst viewing, to lead you to “Dump it and start again, it’s carp”.
But of course, you don’t post that, because your mother said “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”.
But is that really fair? If no-one posts the hard crits, how is the OP ever going to know he got it wrong?
Just saying…
“Dump it and start again, it’s carp”.
If this is all you have to say, then it’s a more a case of questionning your capacity for humility. If you genuinely think it’s a load of bollocks what you’re looking at, then you should be able to look at it and stipulate why and let the artist know what you think they could do to improve his work. That’s the whole point of constructive criticism. Saying that it’s ‘crap’ is not hard criticism. It’s just some twod being a twod.
It’s all about giving a constructive criticism.
I would rather hear about everything wrong in my project than keep doing the same mistakes over and over.
But yeah, there is a good way to give a feedback. I remember once seeing here in this forum a useless and mean-like comment on someone’s project…
I agree with what the above users have stated. I often try to browse on the forums and give constructive criticism whenever possible. It helps when you don’t just list everything they did wrong, but also give some advice on what they could do to make it better. Also if you can, list a couple things they did well on so your post doesn’t come off as completely negative.
It’s all about trying to phrase the negative aspects in a positive tone. You can be critical about something without being excessively harsh.
But if all you can say about something is to “dump it and start again” because it’s bad, then you probably should keep that to yourself. Saying purely negative things like that even with good intentions helps nobody.
I guess it depends where they are with their artistic development as well. I mean someone who’s literally only started doing art that day / week could expect to be told to just drop what they’re doing and have another go at it. Even seasoned people work on something and realise it’s just going nowhere and stop and restart afresh.
Beginners should only be told to drop it and try again if they’re visibly flustered and they’ve taken what they’ve created to the edge at that time. It balls down to ‘drop this, but bare x and y in mind for when you try again;’ again constructive critcism.
I quit giving online critiques unless asked. A lot of posters are only seeking praise and validation. Which is fine; I did the same in my youth. I don’t want to waste my time writing something that only serves to upset them either, though.
When I do a critique, I find that showing a solution is more useful than only establishing problems. So I try to include references, tutorials, or a paint-over if time permits. I also try to maintain objectivity in regards to the subject matter. If someone can derive my opinion on the Halo IP or whatever, I gave a really bad critique.
There is a balance, I would agree with the fact that it might be a little harsh to tell beginners to nuke their work, but we also don’t want to go down the route of just giving them blind praise no matter the circumstance (like what you often see in some other forums in the name of giving a ‘positive atmosphere’).
Tell them what they can improve, but also notify where they did a good job. Take their skill level into account, but don’t just say the piece is perfect just because it might be one of their first ones. Tell them that this forum is not designed to be a safe space where they can feel warm and fuzzy if they even do nothing more than post a mess of default cubes (they must have at least a base-level ability to handle critique as long as it’s not an outright character attack or an otherwise extremely harsh statement).
Also to note, it’s a good idea to give specifics on just what techniques they can use to improve their work (so they can put your critique into practice), don’t fluster them with complex practices that you do not intend to reveal.
At this point, we’re pretty much repeating ourselves here while going in circles with the whole “constructive criticism” and “be critical about their flaws, but not overly harsh about it” ideas we’re saying. Is there anything else to say about this topic that hasn’t already been said?