Hey, @Jonas, sorry to be catching up late with your post! You’ve got a nice piece going on here! If this is to be an illustration for a poster or something, I imagine the composition could be made a bit more dynamic, perhaps by making the flying characters diagonally positioned, or even reconsidering alternatives for the whole distribution of elements in the scene by making a bunch of thumbnail studies. But, honestly, to me, the way it looks right now seems like a concept for a videogame scene (maybe because it reminded me a bit of The Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword) - if that's so, I'd then then just ignore all the previous comments and keep it the way it is. :) Regardless, I believe some adjustments in lighting could be useful either way. I did a (very) rough paint-over to illustrate where I see this could go - please check the image attached! And here are a few considerations about the modifications I tried to work in: . Enhancement of the aerial perspective by making everything far away look more blurry, more blue and less contrasting; . Making the overall shadow colors a bit cooler; . Softening a bit the cast shadows on the bird. Generally, for realistic lighting, it’s not very good to use pure black for shadows because it weights too much visually, so try going for some darker values, but with a tint of the light color that bounces on its surroundings; . The way I see it, the primary focal point is the character flying on the giant bird, while the person waving on top of the mountain comes as a secondary read - the primary read already stands out for size, color and detail, so I made the secondary focus pop some more by increasing the value contrast just in that area, as well as softening the contrasts on the mountains behind it; . I thought pushing the big mountains cast shadows longer could help create a stronger backdrop for the main character. The visual clarity of your composition may be affected when there’s too much contrast in different areas, so, basically, the key would be to make everything on the ground plane behind the bird darker and cooler, so the flying characters could have more value contrasts and more saturated warm colors. Now some might argue that, realistically, the cast shadow of that mountain wouldn’t be that long because the light is top down, thus the cast shadow should be short - so this is a little cheat to help prioritize the composition and the picture read. Almost always, it can be better to cheat a bit and save the composition rather than to do things strictly “right” if it ruins the clarity or the visual impact of the piece. Finally, it’s often helpful to define a specific value range for each plane of depth or compositional area, for example: background and sky, mostly light values with low contrast; middle ground, mostly dark values with low contrast; focal point, broad value range (from lightest to darkest) with more intense contrasts; etc. As a general rule of thumb, when painting, I like to visualize the whole image with zero saturation (grayscale) once in a while, since this helps better visualize how the values are working overall. Viewing it in a small size also helps with that. In case you’re interested in digging more into all this broad and complex universe of light and color, I’d recommend maybe taking some time in the future to study these resources: . CtrlPaint’s Basic rendering series - https://ctrlpaint.myshopify.com/collections/foundation-skills . Dorian Iten’s The Shading Course – Fundamentals of Realism, Light & Shadow . Fundamentals of Lighting with Sam Nielson at Schoolism - https://schoolism.com/courses/art/fundamentals-of-lighting-sam-nielson . James Gurney's book "Color and Light" I know this can sound like a lot of stuff (and it is), so please take it easy and face these recommendations as things for the long run. Hope this helps. And please let me know in case you have any questions. Keep it up and best of luck with your art!

Hi @Jonas very good composition in my opinion. You guide the eye very good to the person standing on the rock and waving. The only thing I can suggest is to think about the shadows one more. I think the sun is standing very high on the right, so the shadows are short. The shadow of the rock needle has maybe another direction. Also the light on the Zeppelin makes maybe more shodow underneath and a shodow on the ground. and the rocks in the background may have more shadow on the floor? I tried to indicate my thoughts on a quick paintover. What do you think?