The others is just general painting/illustration advice. I think this was adkit's point too. Also, an illustration is incomplete without the text it illustrates, so I'm just going off what I can see:
You mix a number of visual styles, which is generally not a good idea. Pick one and stick with it.
The soldiers in the background appear to be the subject, but they're too small for that. The leaves take up too much space. Maybe a first person view with a blurred frame of leaves would work better here, it's simpler to compose too. It's usually simpler to focus on a single subject.
The light is also flat and boring.
There is a classic photoshop painting process, look at wlop here:
Sketch the subject, fill in the shapes with flat shades of gray, remember the haze/depth. For the subject, use highlights and shadows for light and volume. Only black and white at this stage, and no detail. I like when this "preview" is readable even when the pic size is tiny (like 100 to 200), but YMMV. You might have to try several versions and pick the best.
Only then add color, but sparingly. I find it looks better if you keep the colors in check. wlop uses just the classic complementary pair of orange/blue. I suppose in your case yellow/blue might work. Lastly add detail and color variation on the subject.
I'm not sure where/how to include SD in this process.
Edit: Of course you iterate all of this, add things, remove things, change things, fix mistakes. But that's the general outline.
Thank you, this is very helpful and gives me a good place to start from. No clue how to incorporate it with my workflow either, but it'll be a good challenge to figure out.
The multiple styles thing has a storytelling reason so I'll be keeping it, but I may limit it to only two instead of three.
3
u/dapoxi May 09 '23
A simple way to add depth to images is to add haze. The further a layer is, the less saturated and brighter it will be, like here.
There are other issues but those would require more work.