The Tortoise Returns

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a critique from the awesome illustrator Will Terry. You can watch it here:

Since the video was posted, I've really wanted to get back to my tortoise piece and make some edits.

And then, life.

Long story short: I have a toddler and we are in the midst of buying our first home. (All two people who regularly read this blog already knew that, thus the lack of post explaining what was going on ;-) So, I found a few little chunks of time where I was able to do a little editing on the piece, but I was only able to make two of the three suggested changes. This was a couple weeks ago, and I kept delaying posting it, thinking that I would finally find time to make the last change, but I'm realizing that with everything going on right now, I won't be able to get to it for weeks. The tail in the foreground to this second remains untouched. So, I'm going to post what I have, and then once I make final edits in a few days/weeks/months/centuries I can post then too.

Before:

After:

I posted the edited piece on the SVS forums and the changes were met with mixed reception. Several people admitted that they really liked the original piece and felt that it looked more like the way an actual tortoise walked. Others pointed out that the way a tortoise actually walks looks really strange to those not familiar with it, so the edited version *seems* more correct even though it isn't.

As for me, I like things about both. It's a cop-out answer, but as the artist I can't look at them without bias and I can't really choose between them. I'm not sure there is a good happy medium between the two, you just have to make a choice--would you like something truer to nature that might seem wrong to some viewers, OR, would you like something that *looks* right to people but actually isn't? Were this a real assignment, I think that is a choice the Art Director / Client would have to make, because there is no one right answer and, as the artist, I see merit in both.

This was a great (if still incomplete) exercise in taking suggestions/criticism and applying them to a piece. It was also encouraging to see that my crazy many-layered illustrator files are actually not that difficult to dive back into and make edits to the right paths--all that effort at layer organization was successful!

But, back to our main topic. I'm curious:
Which piece to you prefer, and why?