Critique this piece please

[AranniHK]

Here is my most recent artwork "Warrior of Steel". Altough I like it alot, it doesn't really have something great... Well, I can't explain it. Please help me to figure out, what is wrong!


imgur link: http://imgur.com/x4U0Mtd

[Chris P]

The focus of the picture seems to be the finger nails. They are the only thing in the picture that is sharply defined. Everything else is blurry with some sort of digital filter(?) to it. Decide what the focus should be - then flesh out more details there. As it is, the blurring effect is overused.

The figure doesn't stand out value wise. If you squint you can see that the lights and darks on the figure are just as light and dark as the background. Try to do a thumbnail first with just three tones (light gray, mid gray, dark gray) and make the picture work with large shapes of just these tones. Once that is done, start with rendering light and shadow, but keep the overall tones (e.g. the shadow on something that was dark in the thumbnail will be darker than the darkest shadow of something that was light in the thumbnail).

What is the design of the piece? Who is this guy? What kind of clothing is he wearing? Right now it looks a bit like in a couple of places you weren't exactly sure how something is supposed to work - ad trying to cover that up with some generic undefined shape to avoid having to do research. For example that round-ish thing covering his shoulder and the very hard shadow edge on the side of his chest next to it. Or his arms. Look at some real world fashion (or armor?) designs, do studies from that, then do your own design, then return to the illustration.