Once upon a time deviantART.com was a utopia of constructive criticism and critiquing, but as of late the rush to comment often leaves thoughtless and unhelpful comments. deviantART.com was created by artists, for artists to help other artists define and hone their artistic capabilities and techniques; Let’s bring the community back to it’s goal!


The advanced critique is important, providing the deviants involved, critiqued and critiquing, an opportunity to increase their artistic capability. I have always been a thorough supporter of critiques for this simple fact, but sometimes critiques can turn negative and the message is lost with-in. I will provide you with information I have found helpful in critiquing others and being critiqued here-in.

Advanced Critiquing on deviantART.com:

There are four elements of giving a good critique: Description, Analysis, Interpretation and Evaluation. All of which should flow seamlessly into a critique and I feel doesn’t need to fit a certain template. The most important thing to remember with these above steps is to never discredit the artist by belittling them. This is achieved by always complimenting the good and helping to try to fix the negative!

When critiquing, take into consideration the written description of the artwork, along with the title and the artist creating the work. This will give you a good basis of the theme of the image. You should describe what you see on the surface first and foremost which enables the artist being critiqued to understand you see their work exactly how they made it.

Once you have described elements of the work you are now better prepared to analyze exactly what you have seen. When you do your analysis make sure to concentrate on how the work is constructed or planned (i.e. movements, lines, hues, colors, subtleties) and if the work has subjects and/or characters, what are the relationships between or among them?

You’ve now described and analyzed a piece of work or an element with-in that work and it’s time to interpret that information into how you think or feel. Describe the expressive qualities you find in the work. What expressive language would you use to describe the qualities (i.e. analogy or metaphor)? How does the work relate to other ideas or events in the world and/or in your other studies?

The most important step, and what helps both the artist critiqued and the artist critiquing comes last. In a positive way you will now evaluate the artwork from a technical point of view. You have already described, analyzed and interpreted the artwork, now it’s time to really get technical about what qualities of the work made you feel it was a success or failure. This is where I feel a lot of artists deviate from a good critique and their message is lost with-in negativity. Always start off with complementing a technical aspect of the artwork and then follow up with an improvement:

“The texture you used for the floor was an outstanding idea, the lighting is well conceptualized and the texture perspective is right on! However I think when you added perspective to the floor texture some of the pixel quality was lost because of the perspective re-size”

The above is a great example of how to include an improvement with-in a critique and have the improvement heard. It will always remain important throughout the whole critique to always let the artist know what they did right!

You should also pull on your own design theory and experience when attempting to help an artist fix a piece of their artwork:

“The texture you used for the floor was an outstanding idea, the lighting is well conceptualized and the texture perspective is right on! However I think when you added perspective to the floor texture some of the pixel quality was lost because of the perspective re-size. I think perhaps if instead of going from small to large with the texture you should start with the largest part of the perspective being the original texture size and then scaling it down using the perspective transform tool. I believe that would help with the quality of the texture perspective”

Don’t be afraid to also compare it with similar works that you think to be good or bad, if someone tried a technique and failed to achieve a standard reached by another, show the artist how someone else achieved the effect! This not only helps the artist but also gives another artist credit and possibly a new fan.

I stress again, when critiquing always be polite and eager to help the artist. You want them to feel like you're on their side and there to help them develop their technique and style.

This is by no means a tutorial on formal critiquing, but more or less a guideline on what an advanced critique should look like on deviantART.com.

Please, if there are any questions please ask me and I will do my best to clarify and/or elaborate. I thank you for taking the time to read my tutorial and I dare you to go out and start enabling other artists to become better!

Use our community as a powerful tool to increase your creativity and technique!