Band TShirt Deadline Pushed Back, How Can I Make it Better?

Stinkhorse

So I'm making a merch shirt for a friend's band and I was able to get it to a low acceptable by the deadline. Now the band has decided to shelve getting shirts done in the face of all the other headaches of the oncoming tour giving me a few more weeks to polish it. What can be done in the mean time to push it further? Advice and paintovers for direction are very welcome!

Current Plan:
-Darken the left shoulder to help the right arm pop a bit more
-Rim lighting from the lower right to break up the forms of the arms
-Replace the dainty single shot with either a couple of beers or some splayed fingers with a shot between each
-More pop from the BG party spiral with a unifying, and complimentary color tint

Dangerous What-If Territory
-Chop apart and rearrange the arms so the "Animal Souse'd" tattoo has more room and reading it flows with the piece a bit better
-Redraw the tattoo for better readability across the forms of the arms




This was my second attempt at painting and shading forms forms rather than just using gray, hard-line fills set to multiply. I think I'm starting to see the appeal.

lotet

Holy shit that is a crazy illustration, love it! I Would work on separating the objects a bit and try to make the read as clear as possible. so pretty much what your already talking about.

I think rim lights might indeed be a good idea, you could also play around with the smoke, having it in front of some stuff and behind other parts to help with depth too.

Stinkhorse

Woof, what a crazy couple of weeks it's been. I finally had the time to work on this open up again after chasing a few threads of full time work. Anyhoo, here's a minor update.