So I found a picture by this guy....awesome artist, check out his site, its been pimped here a few times but really, look http://www.bigbot.com/chi/ Anyways, pic is of Swoop, and I fiddled a bit in Photoshop (I'm a PS newb so any pointers would be great) and got the image to look a little more...finished I guess. Then I made a really rudimentary background with the simple grass brush, a sky gradient, and some lens flare and light bloom.....anyways...here it is. and here's the original
the only problem I see is his face is now blocked by the reflection and that takes something away from the piece as a whole to me
lol....odd that my favorite part of the piece is in fact that reflection. Perhaps because I didn't really like the way his expression fit (well...didn't fit) the setting... I'll try updating it with a little more work put into it.... *edit* Tada! I still like the older one more myself but this does solve the face issue.
i would throw the flare on the tip of one wing, closes to the light source, but keep it on the downlow, make it smaller
the grass looks great! but yeah general rule of thumb is to stray away from the lens flare filter x__o