Hey, because writing on the canvas is ass, I'll write here to the points that I highlighted 1) The main reason why your characters don't pop up is, in my opinion, that their colors are too similar to that of background. To fix that, I would use a higher contrast color by increasing value compared to background. If you compare with reference, especially girl hand is merging into the grass because of how close the hues are. 3) the image suffers a little bit from banding - you can see that there are little outlines around characters. However, that leads to the viewer taking it as if the characters were glowing. Make sure you have characters and background on separate layer to be able to paint the background with big strokes/gradients. 2) The main way to add depth to the picture is to make more dimensional layers. Currently there is only 4 - character, grass, mountain and sea. By adding the sky we can get the 5th,and a small roll on the grassy hill leads to a 6th. Adding a plane to the mountain leads to a feel of a 7th one