very nice Joanie! I love your concept and your expressions on the elephants make them look so sweet! Really nice.
A few suggestions:
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When posting a sketch or image with white as the background, always add a border (this goes for all of you!). The white space defines the compostion and it's hard to really see how the image is working when we can't see where the background ends (especially since the background of the forum is also white).
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Once I added a border, you can see that your compostion is neatly divided into 4 quarters which may not be the best option. It's important at this stage to really think about rhythm and flow and all the other little compositional details without getting lost in the subject matter (which isn't easy to do).
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After seeing the image divided into quarters, I chose to mess around with a more dynamic design. Feel free to discard it if you like, it's just a sample of what you can do to add interest to the image. I chose a tall vertical format which I really like. It seemed like it needed some other imagery to balance it, so I thought it might be cool to see the top of some houses. I also added two more elephants which adds more flow and allows for some cool cropping (which I'm a big fan of).
I banked his sleigh a bit more to make it seem like it's "leaning" into the corner and then changed the presents to be falling out the back in that direction as well.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns with it. It's a great image and I can't wait to see where you take it! : )
-L
