Please help me finalize this illustration.

[JosephCow]

Damn Joseph, I guess I'll go cry in the corner first, since your version is like worlds better.

Aw I don't know about that. It seems like I got it kinda wrong actually XD. From the text, I basically was hearing a lot of stuff about romantic tension, enemies to lovers kinds of stuff. I don't think those emotions are reading in the image. So I thought, if the basic story is that the two have fallen in love, and are meeting secretly, then I will start by making that more clear to the viewer and then go from there. And the PO is basically the easiest way I could make that happen. Personally, I actually like the darker ambient scene that you have, and if the things you mentioned are what you are going for, then keep it! As I said before some of the things you have does work, but it works for a different picture than the one I thought you were trying to make. But yeah, you take the feedback in whichever direction you think makes sense, it's not like I'll be offended.

The one thing I still think holds though is that even if you want the naga to be kind of hidden in the shadows, the viewer still needs to see him. I would consider a more subtle beam of light hitting parts of him to draw the eye there, or make the skin a slight bit paler against the dark rocks so it's at least a little more readable from a distance.

My opinion of stuff to work on would actually be more technical stuff. Like we can talk about how the story reads for hours, but at the end of the day, people are going to interpret the scene in their own way, and you have limited control of that. Like if 2 art critics looked at your painting, one could come up with exactly what chat GPT wrote, and the other will say something totally different.

 I tend to focus more on how things look, honestly, despite my previous critique mostly focusing on the read of the story. Like I just look at what's visually engaging. So in this one It would be cool to see the environment more fleshed out, just a little more sense of space and lighting. And the characters and armour/clothing rendered in a pleasing way. All the elements you have here have the potential to be magical, almost regardless of what the story or situation is, so I wouldn't be overly concerned with that direction of things.

There's lots of different things you can do to improve. Maybe the biggest thing for me has been learning to use references better.