I am fascinated by the white pencil on black. I'm wondering, have you ever worked with scratchboard, or tried the scratchboard technique digitally? Instead of applying color, you reveal color by erasing the top layer using textural brushes... I wonder if that might be something you might have fun with...

This is lovely! Well done!!!!

@miriam Thanks! I'm fascinated by it, and can play for hours! It's dangerous. LOL!

@LauraA Here is a tool that Google has created that enables you to compare the color palettes of different pieces of art. Perhaps, if you found a piece that has the emotional impact you prefer, you could use their colors?

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/artpalette/

Second set of nine. These would be #35-43 out of 100... Whew, I have a long way to go. LOL!

I'm beginning to think of these much more from a story perspective than I had been. As I've been posting these on my social media, I've had to give a brief explanation of who/what they are. I'm wondering if these hands need some descriptions. A poem? A short story? A song? I don't know. Should I write a paragraph or two about what each hand means to me, maybe? Or allude to what each hand does for a living, their age, a bit of life's ephemera? I think it might be interesting to have the image on one page, and have the narrative opposite of it on the facing page. Or, maybe, have the narrative on the flipside of each image so they see the image for what it is first, before reading anything about it... I dunno. There are lots of options.

I'm imagining these books are smallish and square--6"x6" maybe, or not much bigger. It's a little coffee table book, for glancing through while waiting on someone else who is on the phone. Or making tea. Or idly passing time in their favorite cozy chair as a soft rain falls outside. I wonder if this would be something in a doctor's office waiting room. Or a coffee shop.

Hm. Lots to think about.

Perhaps simple horizontal striations with a texture brush? You have a lovely texture in the water. Maybe you could echo that in the cliffs? Matching the atmospheric effect getting lighter in the distance, maybe the texture of the cliffs gets less detailed, helping to suggest scale? Just a thought.

There are some lovely national park postcard images that have simple canyon illustrations as a possibility, maybe?

I agree with @rinovarka. I wonder if the trucks in #1 might be those mega trucks that are the size of houses? You'd have to have a normal size human nearby for scale, though. I also wonder if perhaps the shark in #2 might seem bigger if it's scale was so big it was filling up most of the page. Just a thought.

Might there be some interesting lighting you could do with the trees being the way they are and the squirrel looking upward toward the light? I think perhaps one way of making the bear seem scary to the squirrel (as well as the viewer) is to catch the bear in a shaft of light from behind, casting her face and front in deep shadow. Then, at first glance to the viewer, it could seem like a big scary silhouette, but upon closer inspection of the shadow the facial features might read as less scary. I wonder if it might make for an interesting rim light effect, too, depending on how strongly the sunbeams are coming through the trees? Just a thought.

The purple one's colors seem both more "dangerous" and more "fantastical". Regarding too much yellow in your portfolio, maybe you can pull the yellows into a blue-ish color? Does it have to be during the day? Can it be at night?

Welcome, Claire! I bet you'll like it here! I, too, fell in love with the podcast and their advice! I binge-listened to the whole thing over a couple of days, and it's a great one!! I've only been part of the forums for a couple weeks now, and I can already tell it's going to change how I look at illustration. There are tons of great threads if you go searching for keywords. Have fun!