Spring 2018 Composition, eclairage et illustration // Composition, lighting and illustration

Sea Beast 

Working on turtle texturing, almost done. I also tried mouth variation and different shell shape. Haven't tone down sky saturation yet.... Trying different value too, I feel the turtle head is too dark I feel the boat color should be more bluish to reflect the sea color, but red/warmish color makes it pop. Not sure what to do:

Trying new things. Here is where it was yesterday evening (dragon close to be done). A. I kept having the same comment about the background. At least half of the time, people saw the bushes at the line of horizon like clouds, sky nearly touching the castle.  So I gave it a try to change the time of day/night, to make it more obvious what's "sky" and what's "bushes and horizon line". Tried to improve the night atmospheric perspective at the same time (which is counter intuitive, cuz it's the opposite of day time). B. I was also told more than once that the distance between dragon (middle ground) and griffin (foreground) is really not obvious. Mostly because of the colors, so bright and sharp in the middle ground (as much, if not even more than foreground). There should be some sort of atmospheric perspective there too, but I'm not sure I to do this with this kind of scene. While talking with someone else, we thought I might ...

Hi everyone, I have trouble with blogger, don't know what it is but I can't post comments like before, no button to publish... I will edit your post and add the comments below your image. Cheers!

Trying new value: What you are doing makes me very happy Esther :) I think I prefer the last one. But frankly there is something interesting in every options. Can you try a version where the light from turtle's mouth doesn't bleed out on the right? Love the waves.