Harsh Crits Needed & Help Me Tell the Story

[BadWoolf]

First of all, I really like the colour palette and the rendering of the vegetation!

I think the bug and the necklace aren't emphasized enough in your composition.
Apart from her leg, there is nothing that points towards the focal point of your painting.
Your trees are in diagonals which is interesting but they don't lead the eye towards the focal point, so what is interesting in the first place actually becomes useless or counter productive as the eye end up "leaving" the image instead of coming back towards the character. (maybe ignore the one in the foreground as the eye probably follow up with the vegetation and comes back in ?)



It could also be interesting to have her lay in diagonal and zooming in a bit if yo want the spectator to really feel what is happening in the image. With your current composition, I feel like it's more of a contemplative painting and that the bug is just passing by, not really being of any significance in the story.
My example isn't very well composed but I guess you can still understand what I want to tell.



Long time since I've done a crit' on a painting so my senses may totally be rusty. Don't take them into account if you fee like it doesn't make sense :).

I love the paintover man! I hadn't even thought about that, the idea of tilting and cropping the image closer to bring in the focus. Reminds me actually of what someone was saying on twitch today (perhaps Titus Lunter...?) about experimenting with cropping close to the centre of attention and getting rid of all the extra trash that isn't essential.

I agree that the composition isn't 100% doing its job to guide the viewer's eye. I have a more recent version in which the legs have been re-posed (it's at the bottom of my sketchbook),  which I think helped a little bit because it took out a few distracting areas like the foot that was close to her crotch. It created problems of its own, but...I don't know. Win some, lose some, and at the moment I'm chalking this painting up as a loss because I didn't spend enough time in the planning stages. Should've thumbnailed it out!

You've given me things to think about, thank you :) Great crit.