Danger Zone

[clockodile]

Great set of updates. I especially like those character heads a couple of posts back, they have a great balance of volume versus exaggeration to them.

As for the speed thing, I agree with what Cyprinus said too. Same boat here of taking ages to get anything presentable together - it seems to be a natural stage learners go through as they hit a certain level of competence, but still need to be very concious of their actions? I'm sort of trying to attack it from both ends by doing the quick stuff and dealing with it looking crummy, and trying to improve efficiency on longer things (Paying attention to sensible mark making has helped me with both sketches and painting speed+quality too).

I checked the values of your illustration in photoshop by throwing it into greyscale, and he does blend into the background a bit (and the colour temperature doesn't seem vary enough to make up for it) - though the sparing use of the light values does help to punch out the face and the magic effect. It isn't such a big deal for his lower body, because it is away from the focus, but the back of his near arm and his shoulder guard gets pretty close in value to the wall behind him and sort of flattens out the image. So perhaps the light already shining on him could be a bit more intense to boost the contrast? (I suggest that over lightening the background mainly because it seems more believable, and would also help pop the near hand out from his body mass more too.) Depending on your tastes, it is probably possible to get away with making the magic purple light be a bit more powerful too.

Totally understand if you want to approach it differently though, I'm sure there are a quite a few approaches. Looking great so far though!