Animated paintover

An artist made this digital painting, then asked me for a paintover (in a public forum many years ago).
I did this in Photoshop, he said it helped. Let me know if you want one too, I will do my best to try to give some useful feedback. :)

The problems I tried to address with this particular piece: the colors are all too bright and light, creating a massive amount of eye-magnets and points of interest, making the image very busy and noisy. The dragon's head is almost completely camouflaged in there. Especially the green is way too bright, forcing us to look at the grass instead of everything else. The stone wall and the tree also contribute to the confusion. And the glowing eyes of the dragon are just completely lost - when you want something to glow, everything else has to be darker.

As you can see in the original (the direction of the shadow), the dragon is meant to be back-lit, so I took that and ran with it, taking the opportunity to create some translucency in the thin wing membrane. It's a cliche with dragons I know, but it's for a reason - it looks good. :)

Finally I tilted the walking stick, because having it vertical was just bad composition. It catches the eye and sends it off in a certain direction. Better to have it direct it at an angle to the outer edge, which then makes it easier to follow the edge and come back into the image.