Hey again @jesusm99 great push towards your finish.. Lets push you forward some more.
I : Composition
As we look as your progress through the piece we can see that you definitely added a lot of elements towards the end which mainly influenced the color and light of the piece.
Which leads us to our lesson of simplicity with composition, specifically 'dark subject on light background" , or 'light subject on dark background" suggestion. We are going to skip all the notes on high, middle, and low key photography terms today.
Even when we pull some examples from Peter's portfolio we can see that he adheres to this suggestion pretty well. Light on dark, or dark on light, however subtle.
Here if we remove all color from your piece we can see whats really going on with the value composition more clearly
What is shows us is that the composition is weaker the more work you put into it because it just got busier and busier and we lost our focus overall. Not to mention we lost some of our forms, but we'll get to that later.
We want our composition to reflect the final goal of our piece which in this case is a clearly diablo/darksider-ish grim reaper illustration.
And what we see here is that the thumbnail on the left is overall more strong than the finished piece's thumbnail.
With your characters torso going from front to back, the pattern proceeds as follows, light (torso), on dark (drapery) on light (background). Which is nice because its a clear seperating pattern of the elements of the piece overall and the forms of the figure are bolstered from front to back. . But on his horns, there's dark (horns) on light (scythe) on light (background), which is not as strong for depth.
Another trick you can use we will call compositional counterchange.
Its where the overall value or hue temperature can change from dark to light, warm to cool from element to element in opposing directions. I made an example. It makes overlapping shapes and compositions clear and dynamic.
Now that you know about it you will see people using it up down left, right, diagonal all the time.
Secondly we want to show the depth of space well for the character's environment, with overlapping forms. If we have tangents, or almost tangents, like the highlighted sections below we instantly lose some of that third dimension when the elements edges touch each other, and don't overlap.
A final side not on the composition, I think the potential got lost a bit with the smoke brush, easily fixable.
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II: Anatomy
I haven't done this shiz in a while, so forgive the inconsistencies cause I'm trying to get back into it myself.
I thought your second drawing showed strong anatomy and some might have gotten lost along the way but it was very strong in its overlapping muscle groupings and where they insert on the skeleton. Here's a quick articulation to show how close your anatomy was, again not how you should be drawing it just perhaps a look at the overlapping muscle groups.
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III: Design
I think one of the things that helps me the most is making an a frame standing character with mirror mode on and being able to push design's the way that I want and see them quickly.
I assume if you were looking at diablo 3 concept art and not diablo 2 art, your inspiration might look a bit more like Overwatch, or WoW. And what we can do is come up with an interesting concept for making the piece.
We take that character shape design style and then use the paint style like Peter Morhbacher. You can also switch it. Stylize it like Peter, and paint it like Hearthstone.
if you want to push your designs a bit take the parts of your character that define him and push those shapes.
Disclaimer Again: This is for the lesson, not what it should look like.
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IV: LIGHT
I think the last thing I wanted to mention was that you need to make sure your light sources are consistent. Gradient maps are cool and do a lot of work and by all means use them, but they can throw you off.
I think you were going for a top down lighting scheme but dont be afraid to try other directions that might be more dynamic and allow you to add more light sources to your form in forms of rim light and bounce light.
I think that's about all I got for you today, keep up the good work, and make a new post in the thread when you update so we know! You can keep the images in the OP or whatever. Nice job.
