Painting practice & composition - Critique needed

Here's a quick paintover. The lighting behind the character is pretty bright making it hard to fix for me. In the first file you can see I added some depth, but all in all, the lighting isn't correct in this illustration. If a bright light in real life would be behind an object like in your concept, then the background would either be very bright + the character normally visible, or the background normally visible + the character very dark. That's how photography works too. Unless you photo edit of course.

You can try this out by taking a picture of a sunset while tapping/focussing on the sun or the darker foreground.
(I made the knee pop out too much, it shouldn't be)

fixweg 1.jpg1778x1142 1.74 MB

fixweg 2.jpg1442x930 1020 KB

Hey Camille!

I'm not going to back pack onto what Kigerneko said rather lets speak about character designs and shape language shall we?

Shape Language

• Shape language in objects like Mech type builds or anything geometric heavy is naturally going to be very important yes? An great idea when making designs for mechs and creating various shape designs is doing black and white silhouettes to get an idea for cool concepts for your characters and what not. Here's an example.

Mathias black n' white images..jpg1920x1280 382 KB

There's an image from someone I know who created 3 characters but mulled through many designs to create them. Character design isn't a way way ticket, your first idea often times wont be the best. I recommend looking at other works that inspire you and see what you can take from them and add to your piece. Sketch up various designs, think about what you make read better. Look how flat the feet are for instance. If you look up medieval sabaton's you can get a better idea for cooler shapes for the feet.

There's much more I can tell you but for now I'll leave it at that. I wish you the best of luck camille, may of paths cross once more.

Exofley

Signing out.