Requiring help on a composition

[foolmonkey]

I have a space-themed piece I am working on, and I am having a bit of trouble with the composition. I am not sure what to do with the upper-third area of the piece. In the top-left, I was thinking of having smaller ships flying into the frame to try to close off the composition, but I wasn't sure if that would be necessary.

[meat]

Having other smaller ships would help populate the image, just be careful of their sizes and distance. That is obviously a planet, and planets are huge, so if a ship can be seen, they're not that far away from your Main Ship, and thus really far away from the planet. If you want to show a range of different ships at different distance from the planet, you might use only a string of light to indicate flight path of distant ships too distant (and thus closer to the planet) to be seen.

I tried a quick paint over, see if it's anywhere closer to where you want your piece to be at. 

[foolmonkey]

Thank you, I appreciate the paintover! I don't know if it's quite exactly what I am going for, but I don't even know if what I AM going for is actually any good. I wanted the background to be busy and have lots of space "traffic", with those lines in the bottom-right each serving as light trails from other spaceships in rush hour.

I drew a tiny sketch to better communicate myself. The blue dots represent spaceships. Is this idea alright? Or could it use some work?

[meat]

Ah I see I see... Yeah just make sure you have a wide range of size difference for your busy traffic ships - that'll really show some sense of space! And you can always throw in Milky Way (or similar view of another galaxy) in the bg to really add flavor to the image. Good luck and look forward to how this turns out :)

[foolmonkey]

Thanks for the advice! Although, I forgot to add that my medium is scratchboard... And considering I have close to zero experience with scratchboard, I will really need luck! 

[meat]

Trudy nicholson is a very seasoned and amazing scratchboard artist. I watched her work once, she makes very established sketches before starting on scratchboard. She also had some transparent films that you sometimes see in a pasta box, and put ink hatch lines on several sheets of them. Then, she will "Preview her cross hatch on a scratchboard by placing those transparent films with ink lines on top of the scratchboard, testing out different combination of angles and thickness of hatch lines before actually touching the scratchboard.