Dropping by for your promised critique - focusing on composition and development!

So first things first let's talk about what's fantastic in your work (because there is quite a bit that I like). The style is gorgeous, very beautiful, very delicate, very picturesque. The storybook aesthetic feels great, this would be right at home in an old book of fairytales.

You have some really great things going on technically, primarily your use of hierarchy in your details and your repeating shapes. Based on your composition (which we'll talk about later) it would feel like the top half and the bottom half are very unrelated. However, that spiral that you use in the clouds and the plants is a great motif to tie it all together. You have a great minimalism in tone too, because you allow your repetition in detail to be your tone. That same spiral, repeated smaller and smaller creates darker and lighter areas in your image (like hatching) and gives it a visual interest while retaining continuity and elegance.

I have to commend you stepping outside your comfort zone and tackling something a little more stylized - it was a risk that really paid off (and I would encourage you to pursue it more in the future, I want to see what comes from it).

Now let's get into the constructive part, shall we?

While the design elements help pull this piece together, the overall composition is very disconnected, and a little vague. The top half, with the horses and the clouds is one succinct, connected segment, while the landscape (with those mini houses and towns, which are fantastic by the way) is a another. The only thing physically tying these pieces together are those little lines of rain. Your landscape, while stylized, is very believable - the horses are almost layered on, and very imaginative. To put it plainly, the overall composition is a little too realistic. Part of illustration (especially this fairy-tale style) is that you get to break the rules. Your image doesn't have to follow the rules of reality, you can set it up on a stage, or flow the foreground into the background, or treat all the elements like they share the same physical space.

I mentioned that it looks a little vague - that's in relation to the page. It doesn't really have too much relationship with the format that it's in. This is known as the Figure/Ground relationship and it can be described best in two extremes. The first is a composition that totally conforms to its shape, it shares the border and fills the space - you see this a lot in full page illustrations within storybooks (or title pages, something like the cover of Gregory Maguire's Wicked). The second is one that completely disregards the page format, either by being its own complete form with white space around and a non rectangular shape - or by allowing itself to bleed off the page and be fully cropped.

The difficulty with your composition is that it's somewhere in-between, not page defined, but not independent either. So here's my suggestion - first physically tie all elements of the composition together. Take those beautiful clouds you have going and run them right into the landscape! Put foreground clouds that cover up some of the landscape (layering is a great way to connect things together) - or just blend the pattern into the trees along the edge. You already have a little cropping going on along that right border, accent it by putting more content there! Then the flow and direction of your image will read right to left, and match the flow of the horses. They are bringing the storm right? Let's see that storm following behind them (and then use that to intersect the landscape). Something needs to pull the whole image together and push it out of the plane of the page and into the plane of the viewer.

One last thing (totally optional, just something to try with your next illustration) - play around with your line weight! In this image you use constant line weight (and a few filled areas - which don't quite fit in with the line-focus elsewhere). Try varying the thickness of your lines as you go. You can use a thicker line to pull a subject forward and a thinner line to pull one back! Even outlining a primary subject slightly (this would work well for those horses) makes it pop out.

That's it - I hope it was helpful.

(Also - what is the fairy tale you mentioned? I took Russian in High-School and we read a few, but I don't remember this one.)

Nice job!

так красиво и необычно!

Как красиво)