critique my sideart

[jaharr01]

Hey just started messing around in gimp and just wanted to see what you all thought about my sideart

[yotsuya]

Crop your photos. All that wasted space reduces the amount of detail we can see.

[EMDB]

Paste it on the actual shape of your cab as that will give a better idea how it's gonna look...

[jaharr01]

I cropped it

[Drnick]

Flames look pretty good, Smoke effect seems not quite right though. Keep at it.

[jaharr01]

Hey Drnick do you have any suggestions to get the smoke to look right. I can't get add on brushes to work on my mac in Gimp. Was thinking about trying photoshop. The smoke was supposed to look like it was getting sucked over the wings. I wanted to do try to do something a little more art themed than a bunch of clip art pasted on the artwork. I don't have any training or experience except for youtube and the web.

[Drnick]

There are plenty of tutorials on smoke effects in Photoshop available from Google,  For Gimp Not so much,  I would recommend swapping over to Photoshop for the next part.  Me I'm more of a Cut/Paste and blend kind of guy so can't really advise on the best way of doing. 

[jaharr01]

Yeah me too. I think i will download a trial of photoshop.

[DarakuTenshi]

Tutorials for photoshop can be modified to work on GIMP. I think the smoke looks fine actually... It's not just lingering. It looks as though the plane is flying through it. The fire on the card though is what I think needs some work. Generally a card is not going to evenly burn around the edges the bottom corner needs more burn marks than the reset.

[opt2not]

You might want to lessen the smoke a bit, so that you can get the contour of the wings to show up more.

Right now, (using the classic painter's squint-technique for determining contrast and clarity of the image) your image kinda "mushes" altogether. The pin-up girl and the fuselage are prominent visual elements, but the rest is all a bit messy and convoluted.
The fire could use a bit more definition in each flame, cleaner lines, and I would make the flames around the card bigger, because at the moment they are looking more like fuzzy fur than flames.

It's a good start, but keep working on it.