I hate to sound negative, especially on a Sunday, morning. So BeanPole, please take this as constructive criticism, because evidently you put some hours into your composition, and they are not wasted, but let's look at the big picture for a moment.

• You have a separation* problem between the characters and the brown area upon which they rest. The "A" is almost impossible to make out against the dark foreground.

• Similarly, there is not enough separation in value (also known as Brightness and Lightness) between the vines and the characters.

Choose your colors very, very carefully when you compose artwork. Many of us take color for granted, but creating a color palette for a composition is often just as challenging as the artwork itself.

A recommendation? Make the characters more on the pastel side, add lightness or white to the existing colors. Traditionally, Easter eggs and women's' apparel for this holiday are light pastel shades of reds (pink, IOW), pale yellow, light blue, you know?

Here's a "Spring Color Palette" that shows some nice combinations of main and accent colors once the snow recedes in the Northern Hemisphere this time of year! At top are some outdoorsy colors and at bottom some pastels. If you like, you can copy this bitmap into Xara, lock the image, and then use the dropper tool on the color editor to sample some of the colors to selected shapes.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Easter swatches.jpg  Views: 140  Size: 17.9 KB  ID: 94972


My Best,

Gary

*Separation: In Art, the lack of distinguishing contrast between neighboring areas in the composition, due to similarity between geometry, hue, saturation, or value.