Xero Error

Excellent job overall. Great form, nice dynamic pose, compelling colors.

One thing that tripped me up on this image though is that I didn't actually notice that the shadows in the front were silhouettes of people (and not just generic shadows) until I checked out the pencil & ink versions of the image. Maybe it's just me and my eyes, because I have Asperger Syndrome and I sometimes process sensory input oddly. Having said that it seems like a few different decisions could have lead me to spot the silhouette people right away. One would have been to give them a bit of a glint of color around the edges facing the central character. Not enough to make them focal, but enough to give them more contrast from the background. Another option I think would have been to bring them closer into the middle of the frame - it's a trade-off because then you're eating into the space where the main character's legs are, so it's maybe not always an ideal solution. I'll also say that the bit of ambient glow around the silhouettes does help, it just wasn't enough in my case and if you added much more glow then you'd risk making them look strange because of the light coming off of their silhouettes. On the other hand I think lightening up the background as a whole, at least toward the bottom of the frame might also have worked well to bring them out without losing the feel of the piece. I think you could go fairly lighter and still keep the feeling.

I also really liked the hands in the pencil & inked versions and am a little sad to see them so obscured here. I'd have liked to see the electric arcs maybe done in a way that allows me to see them, maybe even just as silhouettes, so it really looks like he's holding the source.

I might have gone for slightly less complexity on the face mask at that distance. That may be because I'm looking at a version of it that's scaled way down -- it may look a lot better on the cover of the book, but at least at this size the mask feels a little busy to me... I know some of that's character design and you can't do much about that, but an option might be to tone down the black lines you're using to create the chrome look and rely more on the colors to create that effect.

Last one... I realize this is probably a fairly long critique at this point. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)" /> I got some crits from a friend here on DA a few days ago and I'll pass along what he recommended for grays. It looks like the grays in this image are mostly true grays, which is fine, but his recommendation was to add a very small amount of some other color from the rest of the image (usually the background). So in a forest image you might add a tinge of really diffuse green to the grays or in a sky image it would be blue or cyan. I had an image with a really warm palette that he was critiquing and a bit of purple actually worked really well. In this case I'd probably go with a bit of either cyan or blue, probably cyan, but I think I'd have to experiment with it.

Anyway, excellent work, thanks for sharing it! <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Smile)" />