So do I. It´s beatiful and that background is really fantastic. Although it draws the attention away from the characters a bit.

And is the male playing in the picture?

Thank you! Yeah, I kinda know that it does, but then I didn't want to emphasize the actual characters too much - the people who own them will focus on them, I guess, to anyone else I wanted it to look more like a scene.

And no he isn't, he's stopped because he's heard her approaching. Otherwise not much sound would be coming out of it with his fist around the strings!

Ah okay, I wondered a bit, because his right hand looks like he´s playing.

He's just paused playing, so his hand would still be in the strumming position.

That's the way I imagine it anyway.

Haha, yeah I figured by this it'd be obvious I've never picked up an instrument. But the common person won't notice, right?

Thanks!

The colors on her dress are spot-on, and the texture of the quitar is also very nice! And all in all I'd say all the details are really well done and I can't think of any reasonable crits ( 'cept the quitar fret placements ;) about them. But one thinge that I noticed is that the pic as a whole lacks a bit of depth.

If you want to listen my uneducated opinions, I'd suggest you to try zooming it out a lot and trying to slap in the large shadings before starting to work on the details, and also use stronger shadows in here and there with darker colors.

But overall it's still really nice!

Thank you! As you said, it does lack depth, and your advice for fixing that will definitely come in handy (I've never really figured out how to deepen the typical pin-up shading I do).

Thanks for such a detailed critique Auric!

The depth is all about contrast. Generally when taking photos the camera adjusts the shutter speed and aperture so that the color dynamics are as high as possible in the pic ( afaik ). So the whole intensity-range ( 0-255 ) of colors is used pretty evenly. If you haven't tried it yet, try meddling with curve-tool or levels-tool sometime with a pic that seems flat. Also, see the histogram shape with a pic which looks flat and a pic which doesn't.

So in short: when doing darker shadows the illusion of depth increases.

I used to have the same exact problem but I think I've learned to overcome that. At least for me doing pics with manual color selection helped a lot ( so no layers, no image processing tools like curves etc ). It was a bitch in the beginning because I used to do really light shading with airbrush and multiply-layer and then adjust the curves or contrast to make it pop out. So I just couldn't see what color I should put in the pic with no layers.

I hope this helps some more :)

Most helpful/exciting comment I've actually ever got.

Now I get what you meant about levels and curve tools.

I'll play around, see what I can come up with. Hopefully you'll notice the difference you've made! Thank you!

Oh, you posted it! :D Small flaws aside, I love this picture, and Cass loved it too. Thanks again for all the work you put into it. Also, I'm willing to bet this is one of the only pharaoh hounds on FA, if not the only one.

Dawws, that's sweet.

I really love the background, beautifully done *_*