Draw this again: Journey to the mountain castle

Hi everyone! After a week and some change since the last upload to my portfolio I'm back with a new piece. The original was an attempt at a landscape painting and a kind of personal re-branding. I was going through some personal stuff and because of doubts I had I began exploring the idea of getting into illustration work.

The piece came out all right for what I could manage to do at the time, but it was difficult to convey any details in the background with my limited painting skills, so I leaned heavily on the characters in the foreground. However, that left everything besides the characters to fall apart. The color palette is entirely too cool, and there's not much contrast anywhere.

This time around I opted to work on my Vis Dev skills and work on principles of establishing focal points, framing, and keeping it at a conceptual level for another time. Essentially, the old piece was like putting my foot in the pool whereas this piece is imagining what putting my foot in the water might look like. To be honest I tried painting the piece the other day in colour, but it wasn't great, and the object of this challenge is also to improve on the old and carry new skills into my future projects, as such I'll leave this as is.