For some time I’ve been doing direct copy practice to gain control over digital tools and develop a work flow. This is my first attempt to construct an original image, including narrative, character, perspective, lighting and brush work. While I’m pleased that I was able to create a readable image, I feel it can be better in many respects. But rather then guessing at what might make it truly pop, I’m placing it here for critique.
Dragon Watch
The first thing that jumped out at me was how your focal points got shoved so close together that they almost overlapped and had shared edged. Those two dragons are right next to the knight’s head, touching his helmet and shoulder, and that’s a big nono in composition. Why? Because first of all, it dilutes the clarity of your silhouette shapes when they are butted up against each other. Second, because usually in composition, you want to give the viewer a reason to look all over your image, and when you’ve got all of your focal points scrunched together so close, they have no reason to look elsewhere in your image anymore. They only need to look at that one tiny focal area and they already got the entire visual narrative. The rest of your image becomes far less important.
The second issues, is that your edges are a bit inconsistent. Even on forms that reside in the same focal plane and very close to each other, you have some edges that are sharp, and some that are soft, without any real rationale behind the inconsistency (logical or artistic). Edge quality serves to concentrate focus or to relax focus, as well as convey focal plane in the z-depth, so make sure your edge varieties are adhering to those two logical/artistic choices.
The third issue is the contrast feels a bit much. You’ve got very hot highlights all over the image, creating visual noise, sort of like when a piece of music is loud throughout, ending up sounding flat, instead of having a sense interesting dynamic.Try to balance your image’s values more at the macro level instead of the micro level, so you are balancing the largest shapes in the image first and foremost and making sure at that most basic level, the values look good. Then within that premise, you control the local values at a more detailed level, but keeping with your macro values so you don’t end up with a lot of visual noise.