How to add more impact?

[AdamMiconi]

Adam,

Glad I could help. Composition does take some time to figure out. Feng Zu Design or FZD on youtube has some great tutorial and informational videos for composition and what not. Try referring there if you continue to struggle with it. Also, consider perspective grids for trying to ensure your painting's scale from top to bottom, side to side, is accurate.

So you want to make the golem tall and towering, with a low horizon line, your grid marks would increase in angle as they reached higher up the page, therefore things from the persons perspective (the character in the image) would look small. Ehh... Lemme try and explain this better. So, the guy at the bottom of the image is looking up right? What's closest to him will appear larger, and whats farther away will appear smaller. Looking up from a horizon line sees things from beneath (depending on the angle of the thing). Looking upon things beneath the horizon line... well is looking down upon them. Anyhow, these two paintings of mine were done using perspective gridding. Without the grid, the images perspective would have been flawed, and as such the composition would suffer as well... IMO. In this image, I used an imaginary perspective, lining up the center of the tree (on the ground) with the horizon, and stretching the background up at an angle to give the looming tallness of the trees... http://zeiram3f.deviantart.com/art/Sophi...-314718597 ...
On this image however, I gridded out and drew underneath the grid in order to align everything from the size of the creatures, to the size and angle of the trees... http://zeiram3f.deviantart.com/art/Barki...-333850139 ...

Anyhow, each of these paintings took several sketches before I was satisfied with what I intended to accomplish.

And for your creature... he sounds very... expositional? =p
Anyways, if you're looking for action and movement (something I struggle with), I'd definitely look at http://brenthollowell.deviantart.com/ ... He's also here on Crimson Daggers. Dunno where to find him other than DA, but look through his work, and a few of his tutorials. See if that helps some.

Finally, your current piece... well you have all the information you need (visually speaking). In my opinion your concept piece is already done, the form is there, but the light and shadow are not. So what you have left to do is add the light, and darken what the light does not touch. So, don't repaint everything unless it actually needs to be repainted. Rather, paint over what's already there, but IMO, there's not much left to do... but that's just me. =]

Building skills... hmm.. I dunno. I've just been painting for some six months now... mostly illustrations with some sketches here and there, and I see a drastic improvement from just the illustrations alone. Personally I need to do more sketches and studies... I know that. But... that will come with time. And I suppose in some ways, I'd recommend the same for you. Iunno... what do you think?

CG

You've only been painting six months and your that good?! WOW! Man, I've got to step up my game...a lot because I've been drawing as long as I can remember and I've been in school (2 classes a semester) since '07. I kind of feel behind now. :-P

Thanks for the advice on the perspective grids. After you had mentioned that I was looking through all my past work and they are all almost at the same eye level, same distance from the subject, same, same, same...

I've been subscribed to Feng Zhu's stuff for ages now. I love his work and study it often. I stumbled onto Brent Hollowell on Facebook awhile back and he's actually one of the most inspiring to follow so far. He always has new work going up. It's just incredible as it takes me forever to get new work finished. Hopefully spending some time here will help.

I put some time on this painting over lunch. It's still pretty bland. I tried shadowing her face a bit but I couldn't get it to work well. I've never lit anything from the sides only and I think I'll need reference if I go that route.