Kazeai
Hello! I'm a little out of practice because I do not draw very often but I wanted to ask a few tips. I got lazy with steel but any suggestions/techniques you want to offer about that alongside general lighting tips would be super cute! Critiques in general are more than welcome so if there's anything that comes to mind feel free to comment on it.
Wow, this picture is lovely! I'm not really very good at critique, but if you're still looking for any I can try!
You'd mentioned specifically wanting suggestions on the lighting/steel; for lighting everything seems more or less okay? It's a big faint since the piece doesn't have a ton of super-high contrast, but that's alright. If you wanted to give it more contrast just carry on what you're doing. The sword and shield do seem like they're intended to be made of light though, so is that maybe what you meant? If so, just decide how intense you want them to be versus the ambient light, figure out how far you want their light to reach, and start to work in highlights accordingly with a similar color. If you want them to be just sort of a gentle glow rather than a bright light, you could even pick a 'highlight' color that's almost identical to the existing grays in value; the saturation of the color alone will make it stand out against the gray, even if it's technically about the same brightness.
For the steel, it seems like you're handling it pretty well so far! I guess the biggest choice to make on how to proceed is how you want the metal to look; is it mirror-bright chrome-shiny (which is a huge pain in the a**), or is it more of a dull metal? Whichever way you go, I think the first step to take is to smooth out the shading on it a lot; right now the colors are worked in a kind of scratchy way. Normally that would be a fine way to put them on there--it can look really pretty in a rough/concept piece--but in this particular case it looks odd just because you also have areas like the tail where similar scratchy texture is meant to read as hair. So it get a little confusing, especially in places up top (hard to tell whether they're ears, headdress wings, etc).
I think the number one thing you could do for this piece though, is to adjust the posing a little bit! As it is, everything is looking a little skewed; the feet look like much more of an afterthought compared to the relative level of detail of the rest of the piece, and the disappearing right foot make her legs look like they're uneven lengths. It's unclear whether this is meant to be a standing pose or a walking pose, and she's looking a little like she's in the process of painfully turning that left ankle and then falling over.
If it ends up being a standing pose, a useful trick I learned a while back might help: when all of the character's weight is balanced on one foot in a stationary pose, dropping a vertical line from the centered base of the neck to the 'ground' will more or less indicate where that load-bearing foot should be for them to remain balanced.
I don't have as much experience with walking poses, but if that's the direction you want to go in I would tweak things a fair bit. Her thighs look like they're perfectly even and parallel at the moment, which also suggests it's a standing pose (as neither of them is receding).
Hopefully some of this helps a little bit! I know it's a day later, but with luck I didn't catch you too late.
