Hey Michelle, I did a paintover to help address some of the issues i saw with your WIP. Most importantly it looks like there's not enough perspective block in happening before you jump into the painting. When I placed some grid lines over the scene, the roof of the building is at eye level even though it is below our horizon line, so we should definitely see more of the roof. The grid also showed that the castle structure wasn't sitting on the ground properly. Remember to always check your horizon line first thing!
Once i addressed those issues, the next thing is to make sure your scene is supporting the focal point, being the castle. Your values could use a bit more contrast around the important areas, but you also want to make sure your most detailed shapes and shape contrast stay in your focal point as well. In the bottom paintovers I took both images and broke them down into abstract shapes, more like what you would see if you squint at the image. Notice I tried to make sure there werent too many similar sized shapes in the scene, and tried to push the castle shapes so it demands the most attention. On the right side there's a lot of smaller shapes that don't help the scene and are a bit distracting, by increasing the size of the foreground mountain shapes, we can simplify that area, as well as create an angle back toward the focal point, keeping our eyes going where we want them to.
Hope this helps, let me know if there are any questions!
I chose Howl's Moving Castle by Studio Ghibli
