Using the teals and greens for the lightning was really smart, especially using the darker green to make the lightning in the back look further away. It might have been a stylistic choice, but lightning can't branch upwards. There's a whole science to it (I almost typed it out here, I'm sorry haha), but lightning can only branch down towards the surface. Even if you meant for it to be striking from the ground up to the sky (which is a cool visual!), it doesn't feel consistent here.
Also, something about the shape of the clouds doesn't feel right. Again, not sure if it was a stylistic choice, but I think they could use some work.
Last bit of feedback I'd give is about the devil... I didn't even realize there was a devil until I pulled this up in full screen. There needs to be more contrast between him and the ground, maybe make him about as dark as the knight.
Overall though, this turned out great! The ruins are cool, the knight looks good, and the lightning does a great job standing out and drawing my attention to your piece.
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The lightning is in fact coming from the ground and striking into the clouds, I wasn't sure if I made it clear enough to be noticeable. If I knew what to write in the description I would have explained some of the less obvious stuff in the picture. Maybe making the lightning at the ground wider would make it more understandable to the viewer.
I do think the clouds are inconsistent in terms of art style. I would 100% try to redraw them to look better.
The idea was that each character would get their own palette. However the colors I used for the devil were hard to work with and didn't contrast very well. There weren't many dark red tones. I could have used the brown ones at the end of the palette but I'm not sure whetever that would have been enough to make the character not blend in with the background. A different comment pointed out that the mage is also blending into the ground. Swapping the dark and light colors could be enough, but i'm not sure.
One thing I would like to redo is the ground. Currently it might not look sandy enough.
This is the first time I joined something like this so I'm happy to receive both compliments and criticism. This is probably the longest I've spent drawing a single piece (about 7 hours) and I love how it turned out.
Thank you for clearing that up! I think making the lightning at the ground a little thicker would definitely help, maybe even something like a hole the lightning is coming out of or some debris that’s being shot up would also help make it clearer? Right now with the way the lightning interacts with the ground and how the branches on the ground dim as they get further from the center point, it looks like the ground is being struck instead.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t even realize there was a mage until you said that, I’m sorry. I’m a huge fan of color coded characters, but I think the challenge here was the color you used for the ground. It looks good with the sky and lightning, but I don’t know if there are a lot of other colors in the palette that contrast well off of it.
But hey, for your first time doing something like this and in that short amount of time, you did a really good job! You should absolutely be proud. At least now you’ve learned something new, right?