Problem with too flat impression of my image

Hello! Very cool painting. The solution to that problem I believe lies in how you manipulate forms with light. The reason paintings often look almost 3D and stuff is because of the way light is wrapping around the forms. It's all about giving them depth. The best way I can describe it is pretending like your making this painting out of clay. You want to think in a 3D space. For example, you have some rim lighting from the sky and stiff on the snout of the dragon. The reason it appears flat is because the light is very limited in where it reflects and illuminates, and your values are too close together on the spectrum, try to pull your darks down and bring your lights up. Also, you want to make sure the light properly falls on all the ridges, and surfaces throughout the head of the dragon. I might not be explaining it well enough (I hope that I am), but this is where doing light studies comes in handy. The light will often times define a form much more and give it the depth you're looking for. Look up on google 'lighting planes of the face' or something like that so you can see what I'm talking about. every surface has several planes, and in your painting, the values just don't define those planes well enough, essentially making the image look rather flat. Long story short, the lighting is your problem. A good way to also practice this is work in grey scale first, as that will force you to see exactly where your values are. Working solely in color can be confusing because the color tends to mask some of lighting value with different tones and it can be difficult to distinguish. I am no expert, but I have done hours and hours of research and studies on this exact topic as it was something I struggled with massively. Trust me though, conduct some studies and really try to use the light in a 3D mindset and eventually something will click and you'll get that "DING!" moment where you realize exactly what you've been doing wrong. Again, I'm no expert but I just wanted to give you the best explanation I could because I wrestled with this issue so much myself, and still do have some trouble with it. Hope this helps, and I'm really sorry if it doesn't and just confused the crap out of you haha!

to keep it short I think there just needs to be a larger contrast in values, and adding alot more dark areas with bounce light. did a quick paint over so you can look at it for yourself. also maybe change the eye of the dragon to be looking at the character might help the connection between the 2 characters

One big thing to know is grayscale and values! Try desaturating your image and seeing how the greys, whites, and blacks work. If they're scattered and messy, it'll be hard to flesh out your "voice" in the piece; essentially there's no support. Also, learning light can be key in understanding form and how to use values to communicate that.

Hi there! I really like your painting style and soft way of rendering.
I did a paintover that I think will help:

1. I applied Contrast, Levels, Selective Color changes.
2. I defined some scales with more light and added more rimlight.
3. I painted in more dark places of shadows.
4. I adjusted some of the girl's proportions.
5. I defined some lines that you tend to blend away because you don't exactly know how to fix it (for example, the dragon's neck area).
6. I used the Dodge Brush to make the eyes jump out more.

Try not to blend away areas that you're not sure about. Just boldly define shapes!
Keep it up

Heyy. This was a very cool painting, and I really like it! So, I saw this thread a few days ago and I didn't really want to touch on the matter, seeing that you were getting so much help. And you did receive a lot of help, not saying that the help was bad. However, I noticed a running theme in the paintovers you got, and it was mainly about contrast and and odd saturation. And interestingly, the fog/dust behind the dragon, was always removed in the paintovers above. And I thought that was kind of sad, for although it indeed did contribute to making things flag, they are kind of taking away from the piece by doing so. Now, I have taken some time to properly show a few of the key elements that made this look weird. I also avoided trying to distort the image, change the character or the dragon. And this becomes important when I'll address form.

So firstly, the main issue with your painting is color. Sit back, and look at it. It is nice, but you start seeing the same color over and over again. In fact, most of this is yellow, and what isn't yellow, is very desaturated. The weapon sheath / cloth is more saturated than the dragon! Dragons are high fantasy, right? Make that thing look fantastical!!
So, color is an issue because it limits how you can create shapes and nice forms to some degree. Color also makes things more interesting, and are incredibly important when thinking about composition. And in this case, your colors weren't playing at composition at all. The exception is the weapon sheath, which stands out very much and brings attention to the sword. Though, in my opinion, the sword should've been closer to the character or something, as it is too far from where things are happening. So, I made the dragon look a bit more fabulous, changed the background color to a blue. Now, you might call me a hypocrite because I'm "taking away from the piece" by doing so. However, I did have a reason for this.
The bright light that the character is shining on the drakes face. This was almost lost in the original piece, and it wasn't only because of contrast. It was because of the color!

So, second point. Values. You have already taken a look at values by turning off the colors, so I don't have to say that much. However, I do have a few tips. In my paintover above, I didn't simply crank up the contrast and called it a day. I went over and tried to define some of the facial shapes more, and gave them a greater variation of both colors and values, enriching the shapes. In your original painting, things were quite tame, as the brightest lights on your drake were the same over the entire drake. So, here is where I changed yet another thing in the piece. You have some bounce light under the drakes head, and I mostly removed that because of one thing. Chiaroscuro. What is that, you ask? It is the technique used in the renaissance, by great artists. It was a technique of values, of shadow and light. This was a great time of discovery, where many things in art were discovered. Perspective, anatomy, and Chiaroscuro brought drama to the table. Yes, back then, everything was dramatic, but it worked. And I thought that your scene was a bit too colorless and simply cold, to represent what you were trying to show. A dramatic, or interesting moment. Why do I keep repeating the word dramatic? Because the entire technique was about having heavy heavy darks and having some light. Now, I haven't totally converted this piece to that, because, it'd change the entire artwork, so I hinted it, so it would at least create some mood.
So, values. Values are about form, and I think I understand why the other paintovers were mainly contrast adjustments. The forms in your painting are kind of undefined. You spent a lot of time on the eyes and cheek of the dragon, making it look like something. But the mouth area is almost without detail, and this makes it hard for us to make it look less flat. Of course, it doesn't stop us, after all, a ball still looks 3D. However, it makes it kind of boring, as there will be less interaction of light.

These were the main problems with the flatness. I decided to address that, directly, as this is kind of a big scene, and you wanted us to help you the "flatness" and nothing more. So I don't want to get into composition, anatomy, character design and such. Anyway, I hope this was helpful to some degree. This may be a few days later than you had hoped, but I wanted to reply seeing as I didn't completely agree with some of the other paintovers. They had some good points, don't get me wrong! Anyway, I really like your painting, so I'm sorry if I sounded rude in my points above!

Glad to hear that it was helpful. I want to address your comment on the color though.

It is definitely fine to try things out. I myself like Sycra and his colors, however, this thread was based the flatness on your piece. I didn't mention this when addressing color, as I felt that it was obvious; complimentary colors. So, you struggled with flatness in your piece, and I said that everything was yellow. What I did not say was that, purple and yellow are complementary colors, which directly oppose each other in theoretical color circles/wheels. This means that these colors are directly denying each other. So by making the dragon even more purple, it would help separate the dragon from the yellow light in the girls hand. And this brings me to another problem; the magic in her hand was lost in the yellowness of the scene. So I altered the background to a blue, because orange and blue are complimentary, and this was enough of a color variation to further separate the background from the light in her hands. I didn't simply make it brighter. The blue gave the magical light a better scene to shine in, for it was lost in the very yellow painting.

Hopefully this makes more sense! I guess it sounded silly that I wanted to make the dragon seem more fantastical; but generally, faces are more saturated as well, especially around the eyes. The entire point of making the dragon more saturated, was to further separate it from the background, as both were desaturated.

It's probably still possible, try looking up some environmental artists. You'll see a lot of hue variation in the background, and you can use that, to create almost a gradient, where the background is overall yellow, but turns colder as the light fades away/we get closer to the dragon. The alternative would be to alter the coloring of the main characters, which I considered at first. An example would be that, it'd be twilight, so one end of the sky is yellow, like you wanted, and the other is blue, and the characters were in a shadow, and would get caught by blue bounce light.

Originally, I wanted to alter the magical effect on her hand to a blue, as this be just about the same fix (because the blue would almost contrast against the yellow, and the dragon is already purple, so there wouldn't be a worry there). You'd still have to crank up the saturation on the dragon, however, I didn't do this, because I felt that it would take away from your intention. Backgrounds are usually not thought through by beginners, and they often don't consider that the color might be the same all around, but foreground is often always prioritized, so I wanted to keep that same feel alive, while enhancing it.

I see!
Yea I am absolutely no expert on color and still studying it as well. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work

Here is what I would do. You don't have to turn the background completely blue, just add pinks and maybe purples to what you already have to create the impression of atmospheric perspective. Also foreground need a lot more contrast. I am assuming the sun is coming by the mountains in the distance, if it is behind the figures, the more light would hit the dragon's face.

Hello,

variant 2