Considering the Principals of design

So, i've gotten back to school and i'm now taking a few classes at the local college. one of them is 'fundamentals of design and layout', a great class considering the utter lack of their use in most of my art. Our first project was to bring in four pieces, two representing elements and two representing the principals of design (Google it if you don't know them). i chose to bring in a few of my past caricatures that i thought worked best, one of them being my caricature of Matthew Bellamy, to represent movement.

So we got down to the critique, and sure there was movement, of course it took everyone's eye straight off the page. Not to mention, i missed on a few other key principals. For the most part, what was lacking in this piece was proper emphasis, and balance. there were even a couple of tangents i ignored because nobody had yet to bring them up. Going over what could be fixed in my art, not considering the rendering or likeness, really helped me objectivly look at it as an abstraction and really see where it failed in it's design.

My big mistake was following the reference to closely, for what might have passed in a photo, really made my painting fall apart in terms of composition. So, i've made a few changes, mostly to the background actually, and i'm a lot happier having now considered the principles of design more thoroughly. I just hope i can effectively apply these lessons to future illustrations.

Anyway, I've posted the before and after and a visual description of the changes, i really wish you could hear the critique, it was quite eye opening for me.

and rest assured I'll have more art and some lessons I've learned from my classes up here real soon.

Hope you found this at least a little helpful or simply interesting, let me know what you think.