D&D - Kleptomania

[Boomy]

You enter the dragons lair. The chamber is filled with blinding hills of gold atop of which he rests. Your revenge draws near. The creature notices you and raises it's head in anticipation and curiosity. Feeling no danger and seeing no relics it smiles at the sight of the joke which is your party. It's time to make the final decisions
Knight: I look carefully at the dragon to measure it's strengths and weaknesses to help me in battle
Rogue: I look at Knight's purse and carefully try to grab it
Mage: I calm that idiot down

An image inspired by the shenanigans of rpg games I play. I'm kinda satisfied with it because I made many worse pieces and kinda not because there's plenty of place for improvement.
For one the dragon looks boring and the adventurers are devoid of detail. I just kinda ran out of ideas what to put on them to make them more interesting.
The other thing is the shading or lack thereof. I even drawn myself a light source on the picture but still can't really see how it should work. Shading is hard in general. I read so many guides about it and it sounds easy in general, but still...
Here's what I did to make it

[PixelPiledriver]

The interaction between the heroes is funny. 
Lots of improvement could be made.
Will try to come back to this thread when I have more time.

[Double7]

Lots more shading!

There is a bunch of round stuff like the chest, dragon, pile of gold, try to get as much depth using shading as you can.

This piece has so much awesome potential, the hat made me chuckle at work.

[Boomy]

Will try to come back to this thread when I have more time.

Take your time, it's not gonna fly away. I think.

There is a bunch of round stuff like the chest, dragon, pile of gold, try to get as much depth using shading as you can

I started doing something else right now to cool off from this one, but I'm definitely coming back to it. Now that you mention I sure could have made the planks on the chest a little bit more lively and the shield is not casting any shadow at all either. It's just that I have kinda a lack of imagination when it comes to shading. I'll look into it sometime next week.

[wzl]

This is gonna be a sober reply since it is late. I like your piece, so i tried to address some things with this edit.
Overall it is really flat. This is caused by several things: the characters are standing on the same horizontal line, missing perspective, placement of objects to create depth, the overall lack of shading to create depth, and finally outlines.
There is a lot of noise which also blends it all together. there is no need to detail every coin, chain or scale. In addition to a lot of busywork it also distracts from whats actually trying to get attention, mainly the character interaction.
The main composition seems fine, i just rearranged some thing slightly to put it more into perspective, so it seems more like a location, adjusted some of the poses to try making it more dynamic. finally adjusted the colors to give it a warmer, more unified tone. yours was a lot of the same yellow/brown, grey and red.

you re-used a lot of colors, which is not bad, but i usually try to give certain colors a certain purpose, and only reuse them for that. for one it makes recoloring easier, and secondly some color ramps fit one material or texture, but not another. just something to keep in mind.

for the coin details, try to make them sparingly. create clusters of coins here and there, which admittedly i did a sloppy job off, but i think you'll get the idea. if you add gems and other details, dont try to hide them, make them pop out. its a fantastic world, so it can have fantastic treasure, right?

Overall the edit is pretty sloppy, which is partly due to the insane canvas. i'm sure you realised yourself how tedious it is
I'd suggest to try working on smaller canvas in future projects. it gives you faster results and more room(ironically) to experiment.
That said, i'm curious where you'll take this!

[lachrymose]

Editing an edit. If thread goes anywhere I'll take a stab at it over the weekend when I'm not so tired. To many pixels right now.

[Boomy]

Seeing those responses I had to jump right back into it after all   
To explain the pile of gold: When I started the work I had the idea about making gold clumps. However when I arrived at the point of making them I just couldn't. I had no idea how to draw them whatsoever, couldn't imagine it. So what I did instead was make four different coins and then copy-paste them all over the place. It took less than an hour to make it, discounting the time it took me to figure out how to do it.

I love the changes you guys made! It looks much more interesting this way. I haven't got too much time on my hands right now so I made only few basic changes with the party. Mostly moved the mage to add something to the interactions. After so many changes it's actually kinda difficult for me to decide what to put my hands in  but I think I can manage. I'll update again in a few days.

[[Friends] Ro$$]

Exciting piece! A few tips,

I'd advise against the copy paste approach you mentioned. If you imagine the scene in real life, it may look like piles of almost identical coins, but different sections of the pile of gold will be struck by different light. This is the problem with this copy-paste approach for the coins, it gives no depth and does not capture this lighting. As well, imagining this pile of gold in real life when you step back a little bit from it all of the coins will start to blend together into a giant gold mountain, the single coins will stop being discernible. This is essentially what wzl's edit is doing.

Usually you want to start with a much smaller canvas, especially when starting out, because this limits the number of pixels you have to deal with and allows you to place them precisely.

Finally, usually you shouldn't modify other peoples edits, instead you should be taking their edits as suggestions and using ideas you can find in them to improve your piece. Think of it as learning from someone else's work rather than all of you working together on a piece.

[wzl]

Finally, usually you shouldn't modify other peoples edits, instead you should be taking their edits as suggestions and using ideas you can find in them to improve your piece. Think of it as learning from someone else's work rather than all of you working together on a piece.

Honestly, feel free to use it as base if you want. I don't mind, and people here usually wont mind either, if you use an edit as a new starting point. If you're not going around selling as your own after a minor edit, there's nothing to worry about.
There's still lots of improvement to be made on any aspect.

That said, it will benefit you more if you make your changes on your own picture, just to test yourself. It helps you to realize where your weaknesses and strengths are. What you took away from previous crits, and what you have trouble understanding. Edits are supposed to give you different perspectives on things. different people see things differently. no edit is an end all be all.

If you run into trouble with anything, don't be shy and let us know.
I'm curious what you'll make of it.

also: lovely scales mose \o