KQ4 Remake Cover.. need help!

[Tabata]

Of course Moresco is right, I „only“ have two little probs about explaining and showing my ideas:
1. language
2. lack of drawing skills

I hope, you won't throw stones at me, because I even tried, but here's what I meant, if used as a poster.




It's horrible in technique (and my heart hurts, doing this to such a nice work â€" I'm really sorry!), but maybe you can see the idea behind it and how it could change the view, if done by someone, who is able to do it the correct way.

[Monsieur OUXX]

That was what I suggested as a "halo", but I was more thinking of a white halo.

[Stochie]

Kinda like it. What bothers me the most while looking would be the unicorns leg and it being to busy.

The left side of the picture is pretty "open" compared to the right side where everything just seems cramped together. (Tower, hair, etc just gets cut out of the picture). I Would probably widen and heighten the picture, or make everything fit inside the frame somehow.

About the legs...Im no super expert, but i did make a quick redline with my mouse and hope you dont mind. You probably still want to look up a reference picture.



Anyhow, nice painting take care!

[loominous]

It often helps to take a step back from the pic in these cases, and view it from afar (which on a screen means zooming out), which makes it easier to spot the big issues, without getting distracted by details.

The main thing that comes to mind is that the composition could be helped by tightening/grouping everything together a bit, where there's some breathing space left around the quite packed center.

Another thing would be to relieve it of some unnecessary details, such as legs, and resizing the less important parts, which helps create focus.

In this rough edit, I also introduced a purple "tone" for it, which went along the lines of that Disney ref pic, which may look a bit cutesy, but can be easily altered to look more serious/whatnot.



Side by side comparison:


Animated:


Elaboration:

The idea is basically to create a hierarchy of what's important. In the modified version, the eye is supposed to be drawn to the horse, which I made brighter and gave a warm hue, to make it pop a bit extra from the cooler purple main tone of the image, and hopefully thereafter to the princess, though it doesn't work all that well atm, despite her dark background.

By toning out her unimportant legs (rather crudely executed), we gain some breathing room, and allow the logo to pop out, and the resizing and repositioning of the dwarves on the left works in a similar fashion. By doing so we also get a more interesting overall shape of the whole image, which looks a bit like a mushroom cloud or something, instead of the rather chaotic impression the original's main shape gives.

The tone is basically a sort of ambient light, which ties the whole thing together. Instead of simply applying a colour effect on the whole thing, I applied it only on the background, and in the shadow regions of the content, as if they were all in a purple room, with a warm spotlight shining on them (didn't really do this to the witch or the fairies - I skipped the witch because she resides in her own environment, with a different lighting setup, and the fairies were skipped due to sloppiness).

The new composition suffers from balance issues, and is hardly finished, but might give you some ideas.

Anyway, nice pic!