Took some inspiration from Alphasonik's latest abstract art/Metallica.
To me it looks like a musical train wreck tbh, but I can see a certain neatness to it.

CnC please.

First of all; I'm glad I inspired you a bit!

Now, to the CnC, as usual I will start with the points that could be improved:

Text, eww... Big no-no for me. As most text it looks like you added it so you can say:"There, I added my name so people can see it's mine." Don't do that. Only add text if it adds something OR do it stealthy ;]

Some spots (hand, neck of the guitar, fractal) are a bit too sharp. It's logical that you sharpen the points to lay the focus on there but don't over-do it.

Same with the arms but they're too blurry. This just makes it a bit unrealistic.

Although you did a better job than the previous piece I CnC'ed, it's still not good enough (it never is, haha!) for me.

I like the idea of the fractal on the neck and how you did the background.
I'm kind of curious how you made the piece from the top of the fractal all the way behind the head to the right corner. I think that is beautiful. Although on the left side (his right) of his head it's also a bit too sharp.

Anyway, keep it up!

Thank you!

Let me elaborate on how I did everything. It ended up being a bit rushed but I can always fix the sharpness/blur on everything because I made sure to avoid having 50 billion applied image layers.

For the background/the black part at the top:


The right pyramid's southwest rocket is to the left of his head, and after messing around with the lighting/colors/exposure/vibrancy, it resulted in a nice inky color. That doesn't explain the connecting smokey-inky thing though.

For that, I used this:


I used an ocean ripple on it to mess around with its colors, and used a ripple of about 430% to get it into that shape. I initially placed it on the right, but I thought it would look better coming from the neck fractal explosion. Rotated it a bit to fit.

As for hetfield himself, this was the render:


I used quite a bit of clipped layers/photo filter layers to get the right colors on everything.

What sucks about making silly mistakes such as over sharpening/over blurring is that I generally get too lazy to go back and fix it as I lose the initial drive I had to make the image.

Nice, I probably would've just painted it myself.
I dig that though, thanks for taking the time to explain it!

For the blur/sharpen:
I think I've already talked to you about a clean work style (or that was Ezeth..),
another addition to that would be to do the contrast/brightness first, colours after, depth (blur/sharpen) last.
And all on separate layers so you can always make a change!

I'll keep en eye out for your next work ;]

I'm curious in regards to painting, I don't paint much of anything other than light, and I get too lazy to do it that way anymore. How long would it take you to paint something?

Depends on what I paint, my friend!
I usually get bored after an hour or 3, though.

Lol this style is so old school

anyways to start off you need to work on your composition because idk if my eyes are suppose to be focusing on the guy,the guitar or the c4d on his hand. There are also some quality issues due to the over sharpening and blurring of some areas. The colors need some work because they look pretty dead but this tag would probably just be better off b&w. Finally get rid of the text it ruins this.

and for the artist and anyone else that does gfx can you please stop cropping a part from the tag to make the avatar people on its gotten old 2 years ago

I find that in pieces with a vertical style, there are multiple focal points. My eyes generally go to his head, but as you say, both the guitar/c4d are distracting. I disagree with your opinion about the colors, I think it gives it a smokey feel, it makes it feel dark. I'm personally not a fan of b&w. Fully agree with you on the text, my text still sucks D:.

Regarding the sharpening/blurring, I should have taken more time to hammer everything out, this piece was quite rushed for the event. I'd give it a 7.5/10 personally, lots of things could be better, but I got the look I was going for.

Unique avatars are for the weak. I feel very uncomfortable when working on a canvas that small.

you can work on a larger canvas with an avatar-sized space reserved in the middle, that's p. easy you know

That's literally what cropping is.