Lightwyrm

Lumaris and BorisKourt thank you!

This is a old picture that I fixed because it ended up as a failure when I first made it months ago, It was a nice training in colour teory (dunna there is some colour in it). well se for yourselves, it is slightly skewed but thats because it was partly made months ago.

a picture after not painting for way to long. tried training perspective (not very good at it) and colour stuff.

Good sketches so far - I'm glad to see that you are keeping up the efforts to improve. It certainly is showing! Your environmental work is still a little rough, so I would definitely listen to what Boris and others have been telling you about using bigger brushes. You've got some really nice attempts at atmosphere work, too, but perhaps working in grayscale first will give you a better impression of the direction your work is going in before you spend too much time on it. I remember in a Ryan Church tutorial him mentioning that if the general lighting and composition doesn't work, the whole piece is going to turn out not so good, no matter how great the colors are. I suggest watching some video walkthroughs on youtube to get a feel of doing landscapes. Here's a couple links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT8r8cCL … mp;index=3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_cRsfyl … playnext=1

As far as your portraits go, they are looking better the more you do, but there are still some anatomical errors. A good exercise to do is to take a portrait photo into photoshop/ painter and lower the opacity until you can just barely see it. Then put a new layer on top and use the brush/pencil tool to sketch out reference lines, then another layer over that to sketch out where the eyes are and the general circle/ egg shape of the head. Doing this over and over with reference photos gives your eye good practice for spotting anomalies in your anatomy when not using references.
If you do these kinds of exercises I mentioned, please post them! I'd love to see how you do!

Getting better Since you like to do environments try to place a character somewhere for scale. It usually helps the image.

Yup that added an element of focus. Now in the next one try to refine a few shapes. Perhaps some of the close up materials [grass trees etc] and the people. The people can also be very distant and just blobs. You can try to give them really rough limbs just to have a clearer view. So indicate a round head, an oval body and warped oval appendages that thicken as they come closer to the body and thin out as they come further out.

All it takes is practice and time So keep sketching, I will give you advice as you go. That should speed things up a bit.

Yup, much more definition there. And the scene is clearer. Keep at it!