Struggling with Value on my piece "final resting place"

TamPaints

Mostly Illustration
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Hi all! Dropping my latest work here. I started on this before I joined the forum and already received some great advice from Reddit. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts though!

I've been working on getting more narrative into my works. I'm turning these all into cross stitch designs, so I need to make sure the piece is very grabbing. Obviously, composition and the fundamentals are important, but I've found pieces that bring story into them resonate much stronger with audiences and set you apart from many of the "design mills" (places that churn out tons of low effort designs, which I think actually have a place as many people don't want to cross stitch a single piece for 3 years straight).

That being said, I realized I had an issue on my first pass of this illustration. It felt flat and I wanted it to have a vibrant feel to contrast against the somber subject matter. Below is that first pass:
Screenshot 2023-06-06 at 1.59.45 PM.png


I went on reddit and got some great ideas. One was to check the values in grayscale to identify issues. I also got a tip that I should pull in more tones into the grasses and get some leathery texture on the gloves. You can see the two versions below. The text was there to thank the people where I got the critique from, which they enjoyed!
reddit-value-fix.png
reddit value fix.jpg


I'm now pretty happy with this piece. I've decided to leave it here for now, since any additional detail I add in here won't transfer over to the cross stitch design. You lose a lot of fidelity migrating a painting to a pixel art piece.

I would however still love any suggestions you may have. I'll keep them in mind and incorporate them on my next illustration!
 
The value changes help- especially that lighter chartreuse-y hue in the "grass". Makes me wonder what a grayed magenta-pink-leaning mid-value would work as the light on the gloves? Not so much a hue as a mere whiff of colour there.

Almost like it is reflected colour--- just a scent of hue.
 
The value changes help- especially that lighter chartreuse-y hue in the "grass". Makes me wonder what a grayed magenta-pink-leaning mid-value would work as the light on the gloves? Not so much a hue as a mere whiff of colour there.

Almost like it is reflected colour--- just a scent of hue.
I love that idea. I'll play around with that in the pixel art. It helps to have a lot of hues to work with as cross stitch threads offer a significantly limited palette when designing for them.
 
Really cool what you got here…

I would like to collect all my things and make a video game. this art piece reminds me of a scene in one 😇
 
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