Heya breathing organisms of the Blue Planet!

Today I want to share with you all this project I "finished" today!
I made it using Blender 2.83 and I think there's still some work to do, but would love some feedback to go in the right direction.

Hill Castle

The process:

I modeled and textured everything using Blender 2.83, and did the first composition in Blender's compositor. I used a combined pass, increased the ambient occlusion, played with the emission pass, and combined it with the mist pass to add some depth of field to it.
It's the first time I actually try to be serious on Blender's compositor, but It is quite hard to get the hang of it. Using the mist pass in the compositor really affected my first composition result which was way darker, see below:

In a way, I really enjoyed the dark clouds of the first go, but wasn't satisfied with the overall brightness of it all.

I also played around in Gimp for a bit to experiment with overlays and ended up with this weird result that I'm not sure what to think of:

Finally, here are the wireframe/AO/mistpass to give a better Idea of what the initial scene looked like.

Thanks for supporting art on Hive, have a great day!