[Feedback] Dragon Cat Fountain

[TEETH]

So this is supposed to be a dragon cat statue that will later have water coming out of its mouth and a water basin at the feet. But so far what I have just doesn't feel right, shading wise. It doesn't look like a statue. Any critique is much appreciated. Thank you! 

[eishiya]

The ring of shadow on the neck makes the neck look too thin to support the weight of the head. Maybe round off the tips of the fur too, stone is rarely that sharp. Statues are often heavy and need strong legs to support them, so the tiny feet don't look quite right.

What material is the statue meant to be made of, and where is it located? Stone is often cool greys rather than orange. Statues outside often have cool shadows rather than warm ones, but the opposite is true if they're inside and lit by fire or incandescent light.

[TEETH]

Hey thanks for the help. (especially about the rounding of the tips). The statue is inside a mansion and the blue is the wallpaper color inside. I was thinking of making it grey, but if I did the color palette for the interior would be too blue/purple and I wanted to keep a yellow-ish color as an accent. So I was thinking it could be a statue made out of gold? But I'm still not sure.

edit:

Added another darker red. I'm stuck now on how to shade the legs/tail since continuing the pattern makes it look not so great.
edit 2:

Actually continuing the pattern doesn't look so bad

[TEETH]

I think I'm nearly finished with it. I added a light pink to shade the tan. Any critique is appreciated. Thank you!

(Sorry for the double post, but I don't think people knew I was still editing my original and so it sort of went too far in the backlog)

[MysteryMeat]

You've not applied shading to the whole of it, I reccomend making that your next step. It might be a bit of a pain making it work with the feather texture but doing so will really help it pop!

[TEETH]

That does make it look a lot better, thank you

[MysteryMeat]

I meant more like this! This is a SUUUUPER rough edit, ideally you want to contour it better to the scales/feathers here, but hopefully it helps describe what I mean:

[TEETH]

Oh I see what you mean Yeah. Since I'm using this as a game asset I'm going to hold off on shading for now just because I'm not quite sure where the light source will be yet, but thank you. I'll remember to do that. 

[eriophora]

I would recommend choosing a general light source for all of your game assets to keep them cohesive. If you're going to have a bunch of environmental lighting... you're going to have a much more difficult time making your assets look good unless you want to have multiple versions of each with different light sources.

Right now, you're getting bogged down with texture. It's too much and it looks messy. When you have a light source, you can shade to suggest texture without it becoming overwhelming.

I also recommend using more of a stone-coloured palette, as your statue currently looks like it's made out of dirt or mud.

This thread: https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19686.0;all has a great progression showing how to go from noise to having suggested texture by utilizing shading and a light source.

[eishiya]

Form is defined largely by light/shadow, so drawing anything beyond an outline without knowing the light source is likely to waste a lot of your time.
For example, there should probably not be highlights on the fur tufts in the shadows, so you don't need to draw them everywhere. Many outright details such as individual fur tufts can be "lost" in the shadows, so you could save yourself a lot of work by not drawing them unless/until you have to.