Spooky character, i like the idea and the mysterious combination of props, the green weapon, the spiky things in the forground. I am also a beginner with light, shadow and composition, so I feel you, it is all a lot to tackle. So i will just share which tipps helped me the most, to make the first improvements. The first which comes to mind is 'shadows are not black'. I would recomemnd to chose some images you like aroudn the theme you are working on, illsutrations that you like and colorpick the shadows to understand what is really going on. Shadows are only really looking black in the tiny spots where really no light reaches. That is the second point, you have a lot of really dark values, which is not needed to create the feeling that he is in the shadows. And also lots of really light values which creates a lot of contrast. Edges with teh most contrast will draw the viewers eye,so oly want thatin teh point sof most interest. You can play around more in the mid values and only use black and white in very tiny spots (like the gold is too shiny, even if it is supposed to be magically glowing for the composition it is still too much). I always create a correction layer with saturation set to zero and put it as top layer. You can toggle it on and off from time to time and see where you need more or less value contrast. And you will find that even tiny shifts in value are often enough to get the wanted effect. Same for the saturation, it is difficult to use very saturated colors. I only add them in the late process for certain effects. There are artists that can work with very saturated colors all over all but that is really difficult imho and you need to have a great understanding of color harmones. But I in general work very desaturated, so my approach migth not help here. Hope something was helpful, take what you want, ignore the rest :

Hi @Drewster H, I appreciate that you took the time to tackle a full blown illustration like this. In my experience, doing longer paintings that are outside of your zone of experience helps to exaggerate your weak points, which makes them easier to address in the future. I attached an image where I used curves and a posterize layer on photoshop to do a rough value simplification of your artwork. When we look at the graphic design of your piece through limited values, we can see that you currently have a bit of a design motif going on where there's repeated vertical lines, made visible through your light values. Because there's so much repetition of this design motif, but nothing to counter balance it, the composition feels a bit weaker. You had a concern about the wings, and I think the gesture of the wings can bring a great graphic design element to the piece. I attached a painting by Tyler Jacobson, where he uses the wings as big graphic curving shapes. This adds variety to the composition, and it helps to frame the character's body. Additionally, I attached another piece of fantasy art by Chase Stone, simplified into rough graphic shapes. Chase happens to be a hybrid 3-D and 2-D digital artist, which means he is capable of rendering out his scenes to get near perfect light on his materials. Notice how simple his composition though. Even though he probably rendered his character so that it has perfect reflections on his armor, he uses his skills as a 2-D composer to pull back the unnecessary information to black. He leaves the lighting information mostly for the face and some parts of the background, because the focus of his piece is in the character's face. The main takeaway is: you don't have to paint all the materials in your scene to be perfect. In fact, sometimes this will cause distractions in your piece and take away from the focal point. It might be easier for you to compose in this 3 value stage and make sure the image is working the way you want it to first, before moving on to the harder bits like color. Hope this helps! Let me know if there is something that you would like me to address further, or if you have any more questions!

Welcome :) Good concept you have there. The thing that first stood out to me is the image leads my eyes around all over the place before finally finding the face. I'd work to accentuate the area you most want focus on and lead to that. For example, the sword is a very bright and contrasting colour. Is it important to the character? I'd desaturate it a bit but keep the strong metallic look. You've done a great job with the metallic look on the outfit, but it does take focus away from the face with how bright it is so again I'd desaturate it to see how that brings out the face more. Maybe ditch the wings and see what that looks like, otherwise, just grab some references and photobash if you have to to figure it out :) From what I see it looks like he's just walked into the sunlight and is not at all happy about it? I think lighting-wise, if it's bright light it needs to create harder edged shadows. See for instance the attached pic, notice the contrast and hard edges (face, clothes). I'm new at this critique business and by no means a pro so hopefully I'm providing some good suggestions :)