Character portrait.

[Sapphirelullaby]

hey guys!

heres a portrait I've been working on for about 1-2 hours now. It's still in the rough stages...right now, this is where I'm figuring out the colors I'm using, and define the background.

im...i dont know. you know when you have a painting and you like it well enough but at the same time theres something about it that you know looks off or hasn't been pushed far enough? I don't know. Theres something off about the colors of this piece to me but I can't place it. I feel like i can push it to make it really dramatic and aesthetically pleasing but I don't know how. Instead of fighting with it until I give up I figured I'd throw it at the art community and see if I could get some feedback that I could then learn from before i move onto the rendering process. I would really appreciate any and all help -- critiques, overpainting, suggestions, tips.

[TinyBird]

Is his face angled to the side or fully towards us? I can't really tell as overall his face seems to be straight from the front but his nose is angled. Also overall I'd just get proper refs for the hands (seriously to have the pinky finger bend like that always feels so unnatural, I can't bend the farthest pinky joint alone without really concentrating on it), and think about whether you really want the dude's head to be so huge or his shoulders that low (he just ends up looking like his has a giraffe neck) and actually draw more of his arms and body before you crop the image, his hand doesn't seem to relate too well to the position of his shoulder/upper arm, nor can I see any real sense of distance between his chest and the hand, as it's hard for me to get a clear sense of where exactly is his hand position.

Also the orange and blue light doesn't seem to be affecting things consistently (the orange light is strong enough to reach his face but not the other side of his chest? the blue light lights the side of his face but not his hair? Actually if the light is coming from behind his hair then his hair would probably have the halo effect too.) and are those hands what? Ghost hands, angel hands, woman/man/child hands? I'm guessing the hands belong to two separate beings but who knows.

Overall I can't say much about the colours, except that I personally would make the orange bit stronger and concentrate it on the part that you want to showcase.