Hey! Nice job here. I like the dynamism of the scene! It looks promising! I'll focus the feedback on what you're asking, values and therefore, colours. Regarding values: always make sure you have a clear contrast between light-on-dark or dark-on-light. This will give the elements in the scene the necessary contrast. Notice that I prioritized emphasizing this on your characters. Also, keep in mind that the farther an object is from the camera, the lighter it becomes due to atmospheric perspective; conversely, the closer it is, the stronger and darker its values will be. The scene is too dark for an environment with direct sunlight, which usually creates much stronger and more intense highlights. Surfaces such as the ground, the character’s hair, clothing, etc., should have much warmer tones because they are directly exposed to the sun. Avoid using saturated colours in the background. These become more desaturated and bluish due to atmospheric perspective. That’s why I painted the background mountains using a light, desaturated purple (not exactly purple, but within that colour range). I also reduced the saturation of the sky to make it lighter (the more saturated a colour is, the darker its tonal value becomes). In general, I painted the mountains with desaturated colours so their values stay lighter compared to the foreground values. By doing this, there’s no need to use a blur filter on the background—good value control is enough. Leave blur and motion effects for objects closer to the camera or to add dynamism to the shot. This isn’t something I applied directly in the painting, but since the sun acts as a “bully” with colours, anything affected by it will be more overexposed or just affected by the warm colours like orange, yellow, red and so on. This allows you to introduce more colour harmony in the shadows, such as blues, purples, greens, etc. Think of shaded areas as being influenced by the sky; this allows you to add more colour dynamism. You can observe this approach in the paintings of Marco Bucci or James Gurney. Hope this helps.
