What to do now

Well now that I am done with my Artstation contest, I need to get back to some basics. A couple of weeks ago I managed to talk with Alex Negrea over Skype and got some good feedback from him. He said that I need to do the following:

1. Connect with my audience. The majority of my pieces have no interaction with the audience. This also is about working with mood and storytelling.

2. Work on my Lighting, lighting is about mood and I need to reinforce the mood.

3. Work a bit more on portraits and hands, mainly incorporate them into storytelling.

All good advice from him.

He did tell me that I was good at rendering and he did like my rendering of the Bar, because it tells a story, and generates a conversation in his head.
The Bar
So that being said I wanted to say that he was very supportive and very of me and very friendly. 

So now what am I going to do about it?

After a bit of pondering while the contest was going on, I realized a couple of things. First is to get my workflow a bit more streamlined. I tend to jump all over the place when I work and with my workflow I feel I need to tighten it up a bit more. This will hopefully speed up my paintings and allow me to push myself into faster and more art. I watched several of  Anthony Jones's videos on workflow and improving weaknesses. 

I am going to practice working on some shadows and emotion stills to get a good idea of what I need to accomplish for lighting and get some more work on hands and faces with emotion. I will try to get some emotional stills from movies and paint some sketches from them to practice it a little bit more. 

Overall I will continue to work on my work until I reach my goals.