Ok I tried my best to incorporate as many of the suggestions as I could from what I have been told so far, hopefully you will like the changes 
Obviously I haven’t worked on the kid yet, and the foreground is still a bit too alive. I’ll get to fixing these things next week though because I’m about to head on over to my uncle’s house til wednesday, so for now, let me know what you think
ahbeejieh- wow that’s a lot of good stuff to take in, hopefully I’ll be able to work it all in. Thanks for the advice.
Well, I’m back, and it’s time for me to get back to work on this piece of course. Hopefully I’ll have some meaningful updates tomorrow, I start spring break friday so I should have a bit more time to work on this for about a week, even though I’m going away monday and tuesday. So hopefully some good progress and updates will come your way tomorrow.
hi Ramy,
sorry it’s been so long. been really busy at work. your pics lookin great. i think the thing you need to try with your perspective is this. i reason that if it’s two inches on your canvas to the horizon, then at one inch toward the horizon he’d be half the hieght he is now. right? so using that rule i estimate your cottage is still probably half the size it should be. the same would go for a trail deminishing into the distance. (the width, of course, not height)
as far as the hill thing. i’m just saying that if you’re going to have the house be lower than the people, as if it were in a little valley, try to make the horizon of that hill distinguishable. for an example you can look at my master and srevant piece. it’s not great, but it has a hill in it and you can make out the edge of it easily. otherwise you run the risk of your house just looking very short. i hope that’s a little clearer than i was before.
another thing i noticed is that your sky seams to have elements of both a sunrise and sunset. i’m thinking it’s a sunset, but i would try to check out some reference and verify that your pallet is right, they’re fairly subtle. you also have a pretty constant level of saturation and contrast throught the whole image that’s making it feel flat. i assume you haven’t really attacked that yet. if you have and you’re fighting it, then use more drastic changes and force it into a dynamic range.
hope some of this helps. keep up the good work!
~B
Just enough time right now for a quick closeup shot, I’ll be back to respond to comments and work more on it based on crits later
Basically I changed the size of the house and the characters by comparison to each other (still need to adjust the proportions of the characters themselves), here’s a before and after shot of the change. Hopefully it looks better now. I also desaturated the background slightly so that it wasn’t glowing so much, and introduced some blues into the top of the sky. I want to make it appear as more of a sunrise so that it can signify the beginning of a journey more. Hopefully you will have some suggestions for me
Hey anzibon, nice to see you in here again I’m trying to fix the picture up based on what you are saying one step at a time, hopefully it’s at least partly better now than it was before. I’m glad I have a while still before the deadline because I still have so much work to do Hopefully it’ll all come together.
After a great deal of tweaking the lighting and saturation of the picture, here’s what I come up with. I suppose it isn’t too much different from before, but I decided that I would make the background sky the most saturated, then make the foreground the least. I don’t know how well this works, but I feel that it at least looks more dynamic and deep than before. Hopefully someone will have some insight for me from this point, I really need to get to work on the characters, but I want to get the lighting and saturation to a point whre I am satisfied first so that I don’t have to reshade them a hundred times. For now the characters are just place holders in a sense, so I’d love to hear what you think about the rest of the image, as well as the positioning and sizes of the characters by comparison to the rest of the image.
Please tell me which one of these looks better, I just can’t seem to come up with any sort of appealing atmosphere. I feel like the second one has more of a mysterious hazy feel that I like, so I’m leaning towards that one a bit, but I really would like to hear what you think about it.
By the way, you can see a bigger version of verison 2 here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v479/ramy_b/mysterious.jpg
The one on the right edges out the other one in my opinion. Creates that nice atmospheric effect, which delineates a greater contrast between the foreboding foreground and the safe, comfortable background.
I may have missed it, but why the switch from the pregnant woman to this? I loved the colors in the first concept! Actually, you have excellent color usage regardless.
Excellent work man! Can hardly wait to see the finish product.
Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you said the one on the right since it confirmed my opinion. I changed the concept before because I just wasn’t pleased with how the other one was turning out and I couldn’t seem to get it right at all, I’m fairly happy with this new concept, I have a few ideas still that I would’ve prefered to do but I’m so far into this one now that I figure I might as well finish it and make it as interesting as I can. Hopefully it will turn out well.
I like the right one too… the colors are great… and those flowers you show in an earlier update look really good… 
Hi Ramy, you have such a cool name! As for your picture, may I suggest darkening the foreground elements (the upper parts most especially, like the hanging vines) to help focus the viewer to the subjects in the midground better. Try increasing the size of the father and sister and see if it works well with the current size of boy. Turn the skeleton a bit to the right, and perhaps tilt it down a bit because right now it sits unnaturally straight up (unless it is hanged or tied to the tree). If you still want it to sit that way, then the skull should be looking down from the weight of gravity.
The bushes behind the boy looks really great!
Hopefully he looks better, he isn’t finished yet but at least it’s an improvement I think, it’s a starting point for now. Let me know what you think
but to me it looks like he have two right hands… :eek:
but I like his pose and faceexpression…
makaron: Thanks so much, as for the boy’s hands, I think his left hand is just like unnaturally twisted backwards or something and that’s what is causing the issue, I need to turn his hand so that it can be more natural.
jeromoo: Haha most people think my name is strange and butcher it when they first see it ^^; I am planning for the foreground to make the overhanging vines basically completely black, with beams of light maybe penetrating through, but I don’t know how successful that will be. I’m not sure what to do in terms of the size of the characters, I’d like them to be bigger, but then I would have to make the house and such much bigger and I don’t want it to be too dominating, and without the house the journey looks like it’s ending. So hopefully I will find some sort of balance to bring all the characters to sizes that A. match each other, and B. look good together. Thanks for the comment
Ya I have no idea where this came from, but this is a completely new idea that I had for the contest, I feel like it’s so late to be changing my idea, especially since I’ve gotten so far with the other, but I still wanted to pose this idea and see what everyone thinks. I’m not going to just scrap the other entry, I still plan to finish it even if it isn’t as part of this contest, but basically here is a very poor representation of the other idea that came to me. Basically, it’ll be a woman with a man escorting her down a parody of a red carpet, and behind the barriers on the sides will be dead people reaching out, representing the paparazzi, and they will be walking towards the gates of hell. Obviously it’s very difficult to make out all this from this crap sketch, but I just wanted to get an opinion before I go anywhere with it whether it is worth it to pursue this idea or if I should just put it aside and continue working on my entry. I feel like my entry might be too…“safe”? So hopefully I can get some advice on what to do from now, assuming I would have enough time to finish, is this picture worth going forward with for this contest?
Hey Ramy.
I like your new idea but I also like your old one. Just dont get into the habbit of switching ideas a lot like me, its screws you over. But since we have time I say go for the new one, color it a bit just to see what it appears like so we can better judge which is better. But anyway your an amazing artist and i’m sure either way you’ll make your ideas work for you. Good luck friend.
Just a development on this last idea, please let me know if it’s worth continuing or if I should go back to my other idea of the three people going into the forest. Of course you can’t directly compare them, and obviously this isn’t even a completed concept sketch and the colors don’t work yet, but is it a solid concept that’s worth pursuing?
Thanks so much Corey for the helpful advice, hopefully I’ll be able to get to a point with this new one soon where I can make a decision about whether or not it’s worth it to continue or if I should just go back to the old one.
