First I gotta say; I like your drive. In your gallery it looks like you take risks and big challenges with your art(especially the Cloudy With a Chance of Books). It's something a lot of artists  shy away from! So now to the help:

I think one thing that will definitely improve your artwork is lightsource. In sketches and certain standalone pictures like the "Tokyo Ghoul" and the "JMTCreations Art Trade," it's not a big deal really. But in works like the one above and "Omatsuri". it becomes really important! The characters in "Omatsuri" are interesting because for the most part they all have the light coming from the same direction. The problem is, it seems like all of them have that light source in the same distance from eachother. A good fix for this would be to recognise where your lightsource(s) are coming from and the distance each character has between it. If it's something like the sun generally everyone has the same lighting applied to them. If it's something like nighttime, you'll being to definitely see variation between how illuminated someone is compared to someone else. Even in "Musical Notes" it has some intensity and emotion to it. It would be great to see a much harsher lighting used!

Next is focus. Looking at your "Omatsuri" compared to "Cloudy with a chance of books". Omatusri has the best focus. For one, you have a centralized character who not only stands out in here clothing and hair, but also the glowing fish thing in front of her. Our eye very easily travels to that spot. Whereas in the other piece, I find it hard to find focus. Although the girl has a strong green color coming from here hair, her overall light palette and placement don't contrast as hard as the brown bookshelf against the light sky. I personally feel like she'd also have a stronger presence by being located somewhere else on the piece. Right now, I see your beautiful sky(well done on that by the way) and your spot on angles/detail in the bookshelfs, and go "oh there's a girl int he corner." I should be saying "look at this nice character within this great background!" Something Omatsuri does pretty well.

Something to really get the hang of is perspective. You have a lot of it going on ina  few of your pieces, some better then others. Although its focus isn't as strong as Omatsuri, "Dance with me" has a much greater perspective use.  Something that probably helps it alot is the receding brush strokes toward the stairs/backwall as well as the defined wall shapes. Adding in the people, there is a strong sense of Foreground, Middle ground and Background(although the girl in front can be a bit bigger). Omatsuri on the otherhand has a strong foreground, but he middle and backgrounds aren't as strong. A big reason is the perspective. I'm trying to get a feel onto where our eye level is in this piece, but it's a little hard. It feels like the stand were are in should be on the same eye-level as the ones in the background. But strangly enough we are able to see into the other stands, like they are tilting towards us. Then behind the stands themselves, the ground plane where it meets the sky(or lake) is too high. It gives us a feeling like we are on a hill, or we are very close to the ground.

Then we go onto something really important for scenes in art. Spatial depth! Depth is something that can pull us into a scene and gauge the size and feel of a room. Going back to Omatsuri, the depth is there for sure! Characters and the stands, in the background get smaller as they recede. However, the spacial depth could be pushed further in all sorts of ways, here's a few:

Saturation Shifting: as things get further away try to make the colors not as strong as the ones in the foreground. Not only does this push spacial depth, it can aid to the focus of a piece. This works really well for pieces in sunlight.

Line Thickness: A frequently used technique in pen/ink drawings of comics and manga especially in background work is to have variation in line thickness. The closer something is, the thicker it gets and the farther away, the thinner it gets.

Dark vs Light's: Another easy trick is to not make object or people in the background as light as those in the foreground.

So now onto some character related stuff.
I think the only real issue with your characters is anatomy and consistency. For one, you have a very open ended way of drawing people, which is awesome! But the problem starts when these itterations are in the same page together. I think "Dance with me" has some great consistency, all of the characters seem to be from the same world. Whereas in Omatsuri, the girl in front has a very strong difference between everyone else.

What makes her stand out more compared to everyone is her anatomy. It's pretty spot on actually! From chin to the top of the head, she has a pretty realistic head shape, even her jawline is believable and cute. Her lifted hand is also the perfect size in proportion to the characters face. But then everyone else takes a more stylized approach. Their had shapes and profiles seem more old-school manga style, while the girl looks like she came out of a Samurai Champloo episode. Both styles are fine, but together they don't mix well.

Onto anatomy in general. Every artist who draws cartoons,anime,manga,comic, etc inspired art hates to here this, but you gotta draw from real life. All the best artists whether they are working on Justice League or Sword Art Online, has to understand anatomy. How it works and why it works. You gotta understand how far a foot will bend, how long an arm needs to be and so on.  Although it's fun to draw in a specific style, all your favorite shows/comics and their artists went through the process of learning to draw the human body. Here's a good example of good proportions: classconnection.s3.amazonaws.c…


Although I don't draw very "realistic characters," I like to keep a basic structure in mind whenever I draw: A characters Torso(from neck to crotch) should be about 3 heads long. Their legs should be about 4. Their arms should be able to reach past their crotch. Everytime your drawing a character keep this in mind. Keep practicing it and eventually you'll be able to make judgments of anatomy without have to measure! You can even deform things to your own personal taste and make them look right. But you have to keep at it.

For clothing and anatomy, what also really helps(if your working digitally) is to draw a character naked on one layer and draw the clothes on another layer. That way the clothes form around the shapes of the body. Instead of the clothing defining the shape.

Lol, I don't want to go into crazy detail, cause art is a lot to cover. Your on the right track though. Keep pushing yourself and challenging yourself! If you want anymore help feel free to message me(that way I don't have to make giant paragraphs about everything, and we can focus on small stuff!). Otherwise goodluck!