Jumpstart! Thank you to Reddit, More studies (of course) and Finished GW2 Painting

Hi everyone!  It's been a crazy day.  My GW2 commissioned painting (thanks again for the opportunity Ann and Sam!) garnered a lot of attention on Reddit.com here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/16zy1i/so_my_girlfriend_commissioned_this_drawing_of_our/

So i've been getting emails and contacts for possible future commissions!  Very exciting!

here's the final piece, after about 20 hours of brainstorming/painting/idea scrapping/and changing things through feedback:

And here it is without the characters (Using this one for my portfolio)

I had this painting critiqued by the awesome Kalen Chock on his Tuesday Night Livestreams: http://www.livestream.com/kalenart 

And I asked him "what can I do to increase the complexity of the image?  How can I sell the scale and depth better?"  Here's a quick 30 min paint-over he did for me:

Lots a great criticisms... A few that stood out to me was 

1. extend the canvas upward to remove the dragon's tangency to the edge of the frame

2. put the moon behind the dragon to emphasize the "main point" of the image, drawing the eye toward it

3. Add a forground dark element, a rock

4. Add repeating rock shapes that lead the viewer's eye toward the town, while also selling the scale because the rock shapes get smaller as they go into the distance

5. Add a large mountain structure to the left to trap the viewer's eye and not to stray off the page, but to stay within it.

6. Add more stars, there are a LOT of stars in these high mountain places

7. Fix the perspective of the town so that it has more depth, sloping into the middle of the page, not out of it.

8. Add more atmospheric perspective (haze) to further sell the distance.  Look at the values around the town and then around the foreground rock.  If they are too similar, you have a problem because the town is really far away compared to the rock.

9. Vignette the edges to help keep the viewers eye in the middle.

10. Look at areas where the eye can rest... foreground rock, midground town, background mountain and dragon.

11. Using textures and shape tool, add some more texture and breakage around the base of the mountain.  If you look at snowy mountains in real life, there's a lot of breakage and snow gets everywhere.  This helps to make it not such a flat looking mountain.

12. Repeat a few more man-made structures that go further back into the distance... at the base of the mountain, maybe there's a smaller watch post or town?  Helps to sell scale.

13. Play with the shapes for the castle to make it more distinctive and grand

And of course.. studies.  Can't go without em:

From photo

From screen capture (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

From imagination

Here's an old line drawing I started during last Halloween as a Legend of Korra fanart... never finished it.  Maybe I will for next Halloween :P

An a massive marketing/concept illustration for a furniture company I've been working with.  I've taken out all of the text blurbs and company names to protect the company's privacy.  It is an illustration meant to show the overall vision and goal of the company.  This will probably be colored at some point:

A wedding invitation I designed for a friend:

Commission in progress... Another Guild Wars 2 Redditor request: