What stands out to me the most is the composition, which is confusing. It's really hard to understand what's happening in the overall picture. I'm able to piece it together since I know the story—we're looking out of Bilbo's burrow through the round door. But if I didn't know that ahead of time, I'd be really confused about what's going on. Am I looking through some kind of telescope or manhole or something? What is the round red thing next to it? I wouldn't assume it's a door since doors are usually rectangles. A few questions to ask yourself: - If you were the viewer, what would you need to see to understand what's happening in this picture? - Why did you crop the picture the way you did? In particular, the bottom. - Is there a better cropping that would explain better to the viewer what's happening? - Are there details you could add that could clarify to the viewer what they're looking at? For example, what would make it clear that the round thing is a door?

Hi there! I think you are doing alright, the value on the figure feels a bit soft, so it might be a good idea if you could map out the lit/shaded areas on that figure and apply value/colour accordingly. To me the "not enough separation between lit and shaded area" is the main concern here. As of details... I think it's often simpler if you have a very pronounced value contrast in the big shapes first. Then you can go to like the door texture (it must be make of some slices of wood? and also imperfections along the edges, that fence, texture on the grassland, clip and sewing patterns on the backpack?

Hi Tiffanie! I never painted with traditional media before and I’m Just starting out with gouache, I usually paint digitally! do you have any tips or exercises suggestion to understand this medium better?

Humm... you are doing much better than when I first touch colour. I think the brightness/value should be your main concern here. Looking at the painting here, it's like the colours are likely "washed", or like very close in brightness. If you compare that leyendecker one, your green seems too light and the white seems too dark. The HSV colour picker is not a constant-brightness one, which means if you dial the hue, the brightness would change. You could probably use HSL/HSI' picker and you can see much more clearly why you need to keep your brightness in check. A way to keep yourself sensitive to the full value range is you could paint a pure white and pure black in adjacent somewhere on your screen so you could immediately see the range you are working on, so it's less likely to fall into the "ok I think this is dark/light enough" trap.

Its kinda fading in to the background, I would try to push the darks to Silhouette the figure better. Otherwise its pretty good. :)

Yeah as soon as I saw it I immediately thought of Zapata's drawings. I'm a beginner so I don't really have anything critical to say other than the fact this looks really cool!

i really love the vibe of this drawing i hope you continue on your art journey because you already got great potential :)

Try to make the shadows darker so you have a clear separation between shadow and light, and also by doing that you'll have more value range available in the lights to render forms in halftone. Steven Zapata always says that you can always make the shadows darker! in pencil we tend to think we've already gone dark enough but you can almost always push it more.