Raging Spaniard The Final Fantasy/ Chocobo piece please.
Harro, you have a good level of skill and your output is pretty nice so I can get a bit more specific with my feedback :)
First, the concept. I played XIV as well so I can see what youre trying to convey, The piece has good energy, the characters are well drawn and theres a good level of detail! It reminds me a fair bit of my own work a few years ago. I redrew the layout to go a bit further with what you had:
First, the mobs. By adding more of them and giving them something to do, you are giving the drawing a reason to exist and a story to tell. Now it looks like your Lala is trying to get somewhere running past these little guys who are just trying to mess with you. By drawing them on the foreground, middleground and background the illustration gains depth!
The background. You can see I lowered the grass line to a more steep diagonal. This helps create more depth and diagonal lines are good if you want to sell a more action based shot.
The action itself. The chocobo was redrawn to be a bit more 3dimensional given the camera view and reposed to make a bit more sense with the action. Raising the claws and increasing the dust clarifies what the animal is trying to do, more dynamic leg angles increase the sense of movement and raising the head and opening the beak increase the drama and makes the drawing cooler to look at since its not "default chocobo face"
As for the Lala, this new pose makes it a lot more dynamic, bending the arm slightly at the elbow gives it a nice dynamic curve, lowering the head makes him look more driven, making the hair react to the speed adds storytelling and dynamism as does lifting him off his seat slightly (little fella bounces around more!)
Now onto colors, this is where you need the most time thinking about your approach, I think
Your art has a nice rendering quality to it and it seem,s like you spend a lot of time getting details just right. Thats a good thing! However, you need to start thinking big picture and realize how much more you have to gain by really exploring your light source and exploiting it, even if it hides some of your details. Adding depth will really take your work to the next level.
So, the KEY thing is that you implied the whole scene was backlit (due to the sunrays coming off of the chocobo on the left side of the image. Thats a good thing so now the entire illustration needs to follow that cue, that means that yes, your two main subjects will be mostly IN SHADOW. Now, its important to note that shadows =/ SUPER DARK DARKNESS. It just means that we need to delineate our darkest areas with our highlights and use all the available colors to their full potential. I started with adding the light direction to the clouds by adding a shadow to their left side, that lets you know where the sun is. Then I added the CAST SHADOW to the grass following the same direction which then informed the dust cloud shadows after that.
Once I got to the chocobo and lalafell they needed to be heavily altered since they looked like they were being lit from all directions. Like in the other critiques when I added shadow I did NOT add black, but rather a saturated dark red and dark blue. I took care to make sure cast shadows were strong as well (his leg casting on the feathers, the wing on the leg, etc, push your shadows further!) THEN I went in and added the crucial element to make everything pop
Rim lighting!
Look at the edge of the weapon, hair, pants, feathers, face, feet, pouches. I went with a saturated yellow or orange for the most part and used that to not just hit the rims but to add extra texture to where they lay. It really helps make everything feel 3D and separates the elements with a nice sense of depth. Notice how now you can clearly look at the reins and know which one is in front and which is behind whereas before you could only tell because of the lineart. You can also clearly tell which leg is closer to the sun than the other. Everything is a lot more consistent and ties the illustration together even with my sloppy rendering (only painted this for about 10 minutes)
If I were to give you an overall critique, it would be to integrate your characters into your backgrounds more. It doesnt mean you need to draw a castle, but even a grassy field with some foreground details like rocks and bushes would help, try to take your storytelling to the next level (I go in-depth on that subject on sinopiasaurs critique, so give that a read!) Secondly really work on your values and dont be afraid to paint over your nice detail work. You do some good stuff so Im looking forward to see how you progress!