Oooo - very mysterious...dangerous....yet, intriguing? I want to try to scale those jagged edges and get up to the lighthouse? I like that you chose a blue sky - so innocent-looking, to contrast with the island. Nice job!

--
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Time for me to nitpick, yeah, don't you feel special.

Couple problems with the water. With such a large chunk of land, you water in foreground and sides is A) too deep B) too blue and C)too flat. You get that blue, flat water where its deep and with relatively few obstacles. With how spikey that island is, the seabed should be rough as hell. It should also be shallow since you're at the shore. You need breakers! BIG breakers!

The color is also backwards and too blue. The white chop is at the very front of the piece, where the water should be deepest. Then in the shallows, there's this incredibly blue water indicating its deep water. Ooops. And the blue is just generally too intense. It's pushing it even for a pretty tropical island. For something that craggy, it really doesn't blend. If you have the water on a seperate layer, try de-saturating it to a more greyish color.

Don't forget to adjust sky color to match. Lighten up the color at the hoizon specifically, darker towards sky. Again, too blue.

Everything in my piece but the water sucks, but I'm giving you this to look at for contrast.
[link] You can see how grey it is here, and that it does appear to be translucent. The very heavy satured blue you've used makes it look like the water is NOT translucent.

Also, to show you are coming up on the shallows as it tears up, you may want to put some shadows under the water to indicate there's submerged spires. Add some white caps and chop around the shadows to indicate its breaking around something submerged.

As to the rocks, I think you need to up the contrast a tad bit. The cragginess is not quite popping. It looks particularly flat in the thumbnail, which is about the size it would show up at for Magic. That's not a good sign. Some of the underside of the crags also seems to be mislit in a few places. While you'll get some light refraction off the water, you won't get it lighting up the underside of an arch that appears to be 200 feet up!

Water is TRICKY. It is by far one of the most difficult things to render. This isn't a terrible attempt, but it has lots of room for improvement. Touching up the rocks and then completely redoing the water may be the way to go.

Thanks, I'll see what I can do about revisiting the water.

...and the rocks, of course. But it sounds like the water is the really big problem. I'm not sure how to handle changes to the water. I had pictured the spiky doom island as a geographical anomaly that should still definitely have some spiky rocks in the water surrounding it, so I guess I should have the rougher water you talked about. On the other hand, I chose the smooth water in the first place because I thought it would be a nice contrast to the spiky island of doom. I guess that's just not practical for a 'realistic*' scene, though.

* as realistic as any scene with such absurd geography can be, at least.

Progress? I updated the version here, and put the old one up as a scrap for comparison: [link]

100% better. The large version, the water in foreground has the testure brush applied a little too regularly, but once compressed down to size of a magic card, perfect.

Lots of improvement! Good job!

Nice water!

Thanks! I got some great pointers in some of the other comments on this piece on how to fix the earlier version of the water. Sounds like they helped.