That guy at the digital art meetup who critiqued my piece by saying it looked like a bloated cat

Last month at a small gallery showing in Portland, a fellow artist came up to my tablet display and said my detailed character portrait had the 'proportions of a garage cat who ate too many crickets.' I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my soda, but he actually had a point about my shading being off on the torso. Has anyone else gotten a weirdly spot-on critique that was delivered like a bad joke?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan21111d agoMost Upvoted

I read something online a while back about how artists in Japan sometimes use really rough animal comparisons to point out proportion issues in figure drawing. There's this old story about a painter who told his student that her hands looked like "weasels trying to climb out of a snowbank" and it apparently helped her see the stiffness in her own work. Your bloated cat critique reminds me of that, like sometimes the weirdest word pictures snap things into focus better than any technical lecture could. The Portland gallery scene always had that kind of blunt honesty from what I've heard from friends who visit.

ruby_grant11d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, my friend got told her portraits looked like "deflated balloon animals" once.