I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks now, and I’ve gotten to the point where I need critiques. :spin:
Any advice would be very well appreciated.
Weird spec is the first thing I noticed. To wide and even across surfaces. But its a pretty cool design 
Thank you. It does look sort of weird with the anisotropic, but I don’t know how to fix that without losing the good shading on the body. Thanks for the critique.
I see too much elements fighting to catch viewer’s eye.
Foreground blurred flower is way too big and important, then you got the bird, the baby dragon, flock of birds on the background, lion’s teeth spores filling the air, and the brightest point in your image, the tiny litlle ultra bight sun, and a thing that looks like a fly…
Man, that’s too much information to catch, my eyes dont know where to look at.
My crit/advice is KISS (keep it simple stupid), work on your composition, get ride of all the elements that you can, and let your viewer’s eyes have a nice trip inside your artwork.
Make the blurry flower on the foreground shorter, it now fills 1/4 of your image.
Get the sun out, it does not makes sense with your background illumination at all, and is the brightest point so, it catch a lot of unneeded attention.
Use composition guides, you can set them in your camera options, i suggest using thirds.
Measure all, because now or your dragon is tiny or your bird is huge, doesnt makes sense.
And, once you got your composition and measures settled, come here for more crits about composition, then move on to shading illumination and all that secondary stuff, because composition is MAIN stuff.
I hope it helped
I agree, it did get a bit busy near the end. Here’s an earlier version:
Everything but the dandilion seeds in the air are to scale. I was going for a 35 cm dragon, so you could call it “tiny”.
The “sun” in the background is actually a firefly, like the one in the top right. I’ll try to clear up the sky to make it less distracting. The eye is supposed to be drawn to the dragons eye in the middle of the picture.
Thanks for the critique. I have never read anything on composition, and it is one of my weak points, although until I made the sky too busy at the end, I think it wasn’t too bad.
The idea of putting the “importat” element in the center of the image is a very bad idea, rule of thirds is far better, but anyway… here you can watch a nice composition tuto by blenderguru
Thanks, the video was very helpful. I’ll try the rule of thirds. My problem was that if the bird was there, I thought it would distract the focus, but I can probably work around that.
First, to get it out of the way – I liked this. Presents an interesting story.
Let’s start with the “it’s a bit busy.” It is. The second shot (the early version) is much cleaner, and the eye is drawn to the dragon; which I assume is where you want the viewers eye to go. The colour and detail in the dragon are really well done.
The out of focus flower in the lower left corner is a trifle large. I would scale is down just a little, but I would most definitely keep it in. It helps to push the eye up to the dragon’s face. And it is a nice example of depth of field. For this composition, it is the only bit that falls outside “the rule of thirds.” (Which, by the way, is merely a suggestion how to visualize your composition. There is nothing wrong with
I would remove the falling seeds, the sun, and the bug-thing near the sun. I’d leave the flock of birds, but I might mess around with the scale. There is a lot of sky there (top third of the shot), and the birds would help prevent the eye wandering up into the empty space.
The lighting is good and the gradation works really well.
Thanks a lot, I had actually thought of and done all the things you suggested (except the part about the yellow flower), but it’s really nice to know that someone else has the same opinion. I messed around with the camera and dragon positions to try to fit the rule of thirds, but I couldn’t get it to work. The birds are higher up, smaller, and farther to the left now, and I’ve deleted the dandilion seeds and the fireflies. Now I just need to render it.
It’s finally rendered. The first night I tried to render it the cord got unplugged, and the second it crashed at the beginning of the render, and so I restarted the render and waited till morning, but in the morning, about ten minutes from finishing, it crashed again and so I had to render it on the third night which worked, except that I couldn’t post it because the internet was down and that is why I haven’t posted it till now.
