Looking for advice and critique

real nice piece so far ^_^ did a quick paint over to suggest somethings you might wana try. I felt like you could maybe add a bit more form to the face, by having a sharper shift in the colours in certain areas of the face. The cheeks are a good example of this. in yours you a soft slow gradient, where as in mine the is a quicker shift in tones which helps add the side plain of the face. I also maybe suggest adding a larger tonal range to the face to make it look less flat.

I also did one where I desaturated the colours and add some bright blood. It is a tad cliche but it does help her look more vampires c. the colours that you have still work but tis only a possibility ^_^ anyway hope this helped a tiny bit

Hey there.
Let me start off by saying I like the tattoos and sharp teeth of the character. Now when it comes to the colors and values you are correct. Noticing these things are key to improving.

As for the values of this piece, The thing I noticed is the full range isn't being used. the face values are to close to each other. There aren't any real dark areas so you don't get the felling like a form is turning in a 3d space.

As for the colors you have, the hues don't change much.

I did a quick paint over while trying to keep most of the colors as well as using the more of the value range.
I added a light source coming from the top left. I added more uses to the skin to make her feel more vibrant. I took your skin ton and I would slide the hue slider down and to the right every time I wanted a different hue/values for the skin.
Adding blood like Tree_head suggested can be an good idea as well.

Hope this helps and hope I didn't change your character to much

Yeah, I would second the previous posters. It's going to be finding some good reference, and searching for the areas where you can put in your darker values that'll help it look less flat.

I did find a reference that might be able to help you out with forms if you're going to keep the front lighting for the final. reference1

For a more side lighting solution like Malcolm suggested, this one might help a bit. reference2 or this one. reference3

Adding some extra details in the hair, ears, and neck area in the addition to the face might help as well, though I would still keep the contrast lower than the face, as to not become the main attraction for the eye.

Some sketches to help understand neck anatomy a bit:

As far as a vampire look, you could maybe look into Selene from the Underworld movies. She might make good reference for that.

I think it's a mixture of the glowing/unnatural eyes, fangs, and fairly colorless (from a lack of blood) skin. Malcom did a nice job with keeping the colors you had, but pushing the more red hues into the shadows, making them seem like part of the lighting, and reserving more desaturated/dead colors for the base color of the skin.

You can see the same effect in the Underworld's color correction reference4

Best of luck with the contest.

I wanted to come in, but read the other guys' crits first - they said a lot of good stuff already My two cents would be to make her face a bit more hollow and thin - it suits vampires. You could also give her smokey eyes make-up. The paintover of @tree_head is very good imo, especially the colours - the pale skin and black hair suit the concept. You could always add red highlight in the hair.

My advice would be to cut down on the brightness, as it's killing a lot of areas of form around the face.

Also there would probably be some sort of bounce light going on around the inside hood because of the fairly strong light shining on the face. I can't really say outright how to fix it simply because you need to decide what kind of light this is (camp fire light, or studio lighting) and if it's strong enough to shine through the fabric.

I'll try to illustrate it in an over-painting.

Sorry for the late reply, I saw your post today by accident and had time to help as well ^^
I usually don't like to do a paintovers for my students since there is not much learn from that (apart of some technical thingies ofc), yet this could demonstate one of the many possible solutions for you to aim at and to consider for your craft.

Here is my super crappy paintover:

Generally what I did:
- More realistic skin tone (slightly flat at front for more feminine effect) with warm pinky front headlight and cold blue shadows to counter that, same as cold reflexions of metal with warm shadows on the skin, well you see the principle.
- Skin subsurface scattering effect (simple red/orange lines at shadow terminator lines and on the edges). Oh, btw, for skin in general - use very soft round brushes (and smudge tool), this way you can paint it quick and easy.
- Freckles and birthmarks for more realism (it also kinda cute, hehe).
- I've modified the left side shape of the hood, because in original there is a tangent with a cheek, viewers usually don't like tangents, so try to break forms where you can, for example I've added some ripples along the hood edge to make it look more dynamic.
- Added a vampire cross (but it could be anything actually) to the second point of interest (after the face) for eyes to look at, it also plays nice with spiral composition you have.
- Oh, and I added some extra tattoo on the chin, just to counter the other ones on the face (in some kinda trio) and also to point viewers eyes towards the cross and back. This way the whole face turns into T-shape stable composition.

The rest stuff is kinda trivial (just polishing), there still many things could be improoved ofc (and should), I just had only 3 free hours today so my apologies for such shallow quality.
I just hope this will help you at least somehow ^^

@nzao great paintover. Do you have your process saved somehow?

Oh, thank you. I don't have the saved process for this one, sadly - didn't know it would be necessary, usually people just watch me painting live, it just paintover after all.
But luckily I made some screenshot by accident like 20 mins before the finish, if it will help anyhow, idk:

You can see there are eyes yet to be detailed, same as eyebrows eyelashes, cosmetics, chest's volumetric forms, hoods elemets, missing shadows and so on ^^