Your anatomy is starting to get a little funky. I'd suggest mirroring your art and work on it backwards for a while every now and then to make sure you're actually seeing what you've drawn.
The thing that really pops out to me about your newest update is the absence of a pop. I look at your character, and she kinda just blends in with the background, and vise versa. There's not a clear "Hey, eyes! Look at me! I'm the important thing!" At the stage of your latest update, this is one of the more important things to get nailed down so that you don't have to rework it like crazy once it's all refined and pretty.
I took a ton of liberties with my edit, so forgive me.
Here are some of the more important things I changed?I played with the composition to try to make your character pop, I tried to balance the values (not the colors), I tried to clean up the anatomy, and I established a strong light source to add a little bit more visual interest.
Here's the first stage of my edit, mostly addressing the
super duper important parts of the piece, and getting a good base to work from.
I identified the round thing in the back, the ledge, and the character as the meat of the image...the parts that I felt held everything together and made it all work. Notice that here I only used the brightest color on your character (ignore the couple stray white pixels on the round thing), and I did that to try to bring her more to the front so that she would attract the most attention, because while the wall and round thing are very important, they're the background and are mainly used just to seat the character, and provide a "world" where the character lives. I'll call your character ivy from now on.
The second stage diverges a little bit from my original goal.
At this stage I cleaned up Ivy just a little bit, to kind of reaffirm that that is where you need to be looking (and as general anatomy goes, what she should actually look like), with all of the craziness in the background that does little more than muck up the composition. This the place where I usually get really experimental, so I'll need to work on that. Notice that there is a whole lot more white. I felt the urge to make the light source super strong and bring the ledge more into the foreground since the random swirly details demand a more firm push towards Ivy. I'd call this stage a mistake since the extra details I added didn't actually do anything. They just sat on their lazy butts eating pizza and being pains.
The third stage is where I started reigning in the background, and got it to actually help frame Ivy.
With help from your piece I was able to come up with a more reasonable composition. I took the long branch looking part that's right above Ivy's head in your latest update, and built on that. This is really where the strong light source paid off in terms of visual interest. Notice that I used mostly light colors on the right, and mostly very dark colors to the left; while this does seem a little normal since well, y'know that's how it would work since the light source is coming from the right, and the shadow would be cast to the left, but notice where exactly I put the shadows. They don't really conform to how it would actually work in real life, and I didn't break the rules because I planned to break them; I put the shadows where, compositionally, they would make the most sense, and frame Ivy the best. It cuts most of the fat off of the background garbage, and (I hope) leaves your eyes knowing exactly where to go since there's a definite pop.
So, to recap, keep a strong composition throughout the entire creation. Try to keep the lights and darks that you established early on, and only use colors that are similar in value in those places. Like, in the shadows only ever use the three darkest shades, and in the more light parts, only use the three or four lightest shades. Keep your ramp in little "clusters" to avoid a big stew pot of confusing values; another thing is to identify only three or so super important parts of your piece that really need
need to be there, and work those until you like them before moving on to the less important details; lastly, don't just add details for the sake of adding details. Try to make sure everything in your piece has a purpose?be it something that directs your eyes to the super duper important parts of the image, adds an extra level of immersion or depth to your piece, or whatever. Just try to make sure that no detail is there just to be there.
I hope I've helped you out in some way. You're awesome!
