This is my latest portfolio piece. Originally it was a coloring page for a restaurant but after I finished I decided to paint it. I have all but abandoned my old style of blending my strokes and trying to be realistic this is mostly due to my obsession with watching Marco Bucci paint and I find painting a lot more fun now
I think it would help if you pulled down some of the saturation and brightness on the greenery as it is competing with your characters, yet not nearly as important. It's in a forest, so you have the opportunity to really design where light is and is not falling on objects. You can use this to your advantage to direct the viewer's eye.
I think that you have tried to be to complex in your use of color and light. Marco Bucci's painting are amazing and although they are quite complex they still follow a lot of rules about light and color. In your piece the darks are very dark, but your highlights are strong, so if the light is that strong then the shadows shouldn't be that dark. Once the sunlight passes through the leaves it will disperse the light underneath it and bounce around elsewhere, so there would be very few areas that have such strong shadows.
Your deer and squirrel have quite a strong secondary red light on their underside, but I can't see where that light is coming from and tbh it probably shouldn't be there. If anything the bounce light should be more green and cool in color due to the undergrowth.
By reducing the saturation the 2nd piece you did, does look better than the 1st, but I think it can be taken more down. Will Terry talked a lot about muddy colors in one of his videos and I think that's what you need around the background and edges of the painting to focus more on the middle. Everything doesn't need equal attention and i'm guessing the rabbit is the main center piece, so the detail and focus should be more on that by reducing everything else.
Hope that helps
@gary-wilkinson In order to have strong lights you must have strong darks. The color choices on deer and squirrel are intentional artistic choices yes I'm exaggerating the effect but I'm not looking for realism. I actually live on the edge of a massive forest and do a lot of real life observation there.
This is my latest portfolio piece. Originally it was a coloring page for a restaurant but after I finished I decided to paint it. I have all but abandoned my old style of blending my strokes and trying to be realistic this is mostly due to my obsession with watching Marco Bucci paint and I find painting a lot more fun now
