Ryan's Paintover

Yo Ryan! Glad to see you're posting!  Yeah man, so Kevin did a pretty good job of critiquig your work.  So rather than just repeat him, I just did a paint-over to point out some of the things kevin mentioned.  So like Kevin said, I moved the focal point over to the side, rather than in the middle.  First of all I stretched your canvas out a little, cuz it needed some breathing space.  Looking at your design, I thought, it looked like a mayan pyramid sort of design, so I just defined the design a little bit more, and I repeated that pyramid shape in the background to add depth , and also to add interest in the background, rather than just have it be empty.  I also added indications of stone pillars in the foreground that get smaller towards the focal point to add direction and draw the viewer in.  And i made the dude little smaller just to make the pyramid look more epic!  Other than that, it's just cleaning up some lines.  This isnt by any means a finished painting, it's a really quick dirty paint-over just to indicate what improvements I think could be done.  And this took me about an 1 1/2 hours to do, which is actually a bit long.  But otherwise man, it was looking pretty good for your first post.  The more you do this the more you'll learn the guidelines (most of which Kevin already mentioned), and the easier this will be.  You best be posting more stuff man.!