@um9s

Peindre

I really like the ideas you have here! I think pushing some elements a bit more would make it even more engaging. Like stretching the wings more as you can see in my drawover. Aside from that, I think the biggest thing you need to work on is your values. You had the right idea about focsing the highest levels of contrast on your focal point, but I think it would help you to try to find some balance. In your piece, you'll notice that you actually don't really have any values in the medium range and everything bounces between extremely light and extemely dark. Complete black and white values should very rarely be used if at all so try to pick from the more medium range values. A good rule of thumb is that things closer to the foreground with be a darker value and gradually get lighter as they get further away. So your foreground would be your dark values, your midground would be your medium values, and your background would be light values. And any time you want to make someting seem far away you would simply brighten it using the background value. So I went ahead and brightened your whole image and reduced all the contrast and focused on adding it back to the places I wanted the viewer to look. I noticed that you actually did try to layer your values in some places! You put a lighter fog behind the people on the bottom there to make them visible which is a really good strategy and something you can actually apply to the whole image! I use this same technique on the birds. I made sure the values of the trees behind them were lighter than they were so that they would stand out. It's interesting that your values had gotten that dark and I wonder if maybe your computer monitor is really bright and contrast is really low? If you can, I'd look at it on another device like your phone to see if you can still tell what's going on in the image. You might just need to change some of your monitor settings. It's a really cool piece and it makes me want to know so much more about this world you've crafted!

@anthony39026304

Peindre

The biggest things I would say are: - Look at the forms of the birds, the tops that are facing the sky should not be in blackness. (the worst case for this is the one on the right) - Consider adding in bounce light, this should not be as bright as your primary light source, but it should be bright enough to distinguish your objects from each other. Right now, a lot of the painting, while really cool, is being lost in blackness. Hope this helps and cant wait to see what you come up with great work so far it looks really cool!