CGMythology's Sketchbook

[darktiste]

I think going with less saturation could improve the mood it depend if you want a darker or a more hopeful vibe like the one you have.But i think if you want a middle between realism and your more comic style work you gotta play on the saturation.Also just for style point of view the more you have detail the more it will make it feel realistic and the flatter and saturated the object matter are the more they become like comic book in my opinion.

I changed the scale on is nose to be less consistent and symmetrical i think it help give it a more realistic feel and i also decreased the amount of detail on the nose to lead the eye toward the character.

I added more smoke to the right to hide a bit more the neck and made it in a way that show the texture there so your effort aren't to lost.

Also because i would think it would be nice that the viewer could feel like he inside this hot environnement the smoke was leaking in the foreground so i help sorround the subject and i did a nice adjusment of the fog in a way that highlight the frog which could be highlight a little just for fun.

For spike i would say avoid spike that are really large there base and really pointy most horn are rounded at the end so pointy one look weird.

I added a few dark spot in the sky above the fog to move the eye alittle more.I think it add a bit of variety in the environment where the air isn't as heavy as in other spot which suggest wind and movement.

One last observation is the element near is left knee they are really flat and they point away from the character which might not be the best element to have there

I tried something to create a interesting mix of both style.Here what i did i copied your image and i applied a cutout artistic filter over it so that i have one version under and one on top i than turn the one over the original into a mask and removed some part of the mask where i wanted thing to be less detail and other place with more detail and focus.It not always as straight foward to predict the result of the filter but you can try to play with the adjustment the idea is to find some happy accident using this method. You can notice the more graphic effect on the water if you compare my two image. It a nice method to decrease the detail level instead and create area of interest.