Hey there! This is a cool idea! :D The reason everything feels crowded is because of the overall scale of the composition. You have a very large statue in your midground, while at the same time, you have huge characters in the foreground. In general, everything is too big, and it all points to your focal point being only the characters in the foreground, rather than what’s happening in the environment as a whole. On the other hand, everything feels flat because we’re only seeing the buildings from a frontal view—there’s no sense of volume in them. I made a small sketch correcting the scene based on how I think you could resolve the composition. I reduced the size of everything in the background to create better scale and depth. Notice that I drew some buildings in the background, which helps add more depth, and also gave more volume to the building in the background. I opened up the space so that what’s in the midground can be appreciated (the statue as the main focal point, the character, the plaza, etc.). This allows you to add more elements in that space, but make sure things are balanced. If you have a big element on one side, add some medium and small elements on the sides. Since the foreground characters are not as important, I reduced their size and placed them slightly higher. It wouldn’t make sense for one to be trying to reach the other character in the tree, because we would run into the same issue again: enclosing everything. You could change the narrative and make these small creatures play or observe what people are doing in the plaza instead. Another thing I would recommend is looking up photos of plazas on Google and drawing over those same photos. Take the general layout and manipulate it however you like. It’s another great way to solve composition problems. Hope this helps!
