Here's a grayscale version of my current WIP. I'm hoping this turns out well so I can get a portfolio piece of out it, but I'm encountering a variety of issues with parts.

And what are those issues? Should be interesting to know what problems you have in order to help you directly =)
* The image seems to be cut in half horizontal and vertical.
* The shapes of the two mountains are too equal, get some variation in size and form
* Nearly everything tends toward a spikey shape, contrast it with more round (for example) forms
* The values in the mid and the lower part of the painting seem to have kind of all the same size

OP

You sir, are the man. Thanks immensely for the feedback.

The issues that I'm encountering are numerous, and just as varied. Primarily it's that a large majority of the stuff in this painting I've got very little experience with. Mountains? Those things are covered in rocks, and rocks are hard. As you can probably tell looking at the previous page, the last thing with any significant environment bits didn't turn out so great from a rocks and mountain standpoint. (Or most standpoints beyond fruity pebble amounts of color, if that counts). Mountains in my head up to this point have pretty much been "those triangles you see in the distance", which is so many kinds of wrong. Including them pretty prominently in this one was to help me fix that mentality. Tackling them and having them look like they might actually have rocks and snow on them was sort of a new thing and took like, six tries to get looking ok. Trees? Most of the trees I've ever implemented into anything have been an afterthought background, and I'm trying to avoid that this time around. Foreground - like, ground and dirt and grass and other things that people closer to the viewer are on top of? I never posted updates on this one due to difficulty with that very thing (well, and also the same rock environment background I can never seem to get right).

So this one for me is a whole lot of stuff I'm usually very bad at. I've been working away at these sorts of things individually on stuff I haven't posted, but by recommendation of a friend I'm trying to finish some more robust, complete paintings. I tried to take some time to plan this one (seems I may have fucked that up a bit), so at least I'm not sitting there trying to figure out what's going to fill up the rest of the image.

Some of the things you mentioned are things that I was planning on implementing at least in part - the clouds are obviously placeholders, their shapes will likely change and I was thinking there may be more, possibly obscuring/softening parts of the mountains. The foreground has received no real attention so far, but I'm really glad I posted when I did because you pointed out some things I would have likely overlooked - if they got fixed it would have been due to mere coincidence, not by my knowing which would obviously be preferable.

I had every intention of not posting anything until this one was finished, figured if I posted something it'd just sit here until I posted the finished one anyway but I figured what the hell. I'm glad I took the time, I hadn't realized a lot of the things you mentioned with overall composition and I'll see what I can do about them. Sort of funny the things you mentioned weren't what I'd struggled with directly...rather they were with things I hadn't even realized at all, haha.

I appreciate it, thanks again.

No Problem man!

First of all, as Yohann Shepacz said so wisely on a question how he is so good: 'I reference the shit out of anything I paint, even if it takes longer to search for the reference than the painting itself.'
I can just agree on this. Your painting totally looks like you've drawn and painted everything out of imagination. Get references for everything and use them! Even for composition. Look at paintings you like from other artists and look what and how they did it! You really cannot know anything!