>>459529
I count at least 15 defects in that section alone. The issue is consistency, you must be consistent in your technique or every element looks like garbage.
For example you can use a hard outline against gradient blocks to preserve your hard corners, that's valid, but if you do that you have to do it everywhere and not mesh other gradients.
If you mesh gradients and lose your hard internal edges, you have to loose them more or less everywhere, the shadow under the chin is meshed but the one above the lip is not, so both look like trash.
If your image has one point shadow (this one does), you can't then back-shaddow to achieve a gradient. So in this image the nostril shadow is consistent with the one point shadowing of the chin and the image overall; but the backs hadow from behind the nose seems to come from nowhere and be cast in no drection. Shadows are always cast, they are not the "color" of the skin area.
And it may seem like I'm being picky; but that's what this style and design is, that's what separates an artists work from AIslop, it's the consistency of technique. There is no right or wrong way to vector, but there are styles, and AI generates civually so just uses a total slop of styles, it just uses the best visual match, it doesn't know how to interpret images the "wrong" way so as to preserve the overall style of a work.
I make this point often, to clients, in defence of hand drawn work of many styles. Mixed technique is a dead give away of AI rendering and it looks both sloppy and generates progressively weaker assets. When you accept these errors, you accept a cascade of errors, and AI just eats it's own stylistic errors over and over until you get the classic degenerate art form we all associate with globohomo.
I'm hardly a master of vector art, but that's the underlying reason it should be respected and why it is used in virtually all commercial contexts
