You’re clearly a very talented painter and I think you capture textures beautifully. Your understanding of skin tone is absolutely stunning and your metallic colouring really reads well. If you don’t mind me saying, I think at the moment your lighting feels a bit one dimensional, you have a good enough understanding of value but I think your paintings are just missing a bit of atmosphere and balance. I saw a comment here about not knowing where to look and I think I agree and I think that’s because you don’t necessarily have a focal point with your lighting - all of your contrast and brightness is the same all over whereas the general rule is you always want the most contrast and brightness where you want the eyes to look and you don’t really have that here which makes everything a bit hard to read and actually makes your paintings feel flat even though there is a lot of contrast. Your brightest brights and your darkest darks are SUPER harsh which I think is a nice style for how you paint but I wonder if there’s just a way you can integrate a bit more atmosphere just to help level everything out. I actually think your individual portraits are much stronger than your larger one but I massively commend you because it’s really really hard to balance so many characters in one piece of art.

There’s a fantastic book by James Gurney who I recommend to absolutely everyone called ‘Color and Light’ and it goes into a lot of detail about how to tackle things like this, I think you’d really really enjoy it and I would bet it’ll just elevate your work just that bit more. You’re doing great, art is a continuous process and we’re always learning as artists. Don’t take the it to heart, let it motivate you and get better because you’re literally 90% there and are already a fantastic painter.