Okay. You asked for it. It's grilling time, and you're the food of choice it seems today Johnny! (Since you asked so nicely)
I want to outline a few things that I think could really benefit your works if focused upon. Namely, I shall be talking about these main three points:
And afterwards I shall touch on any other points that appear among those. For reference, I shall be using these three pieces:
Now without further ado, let us begin.
My first point in this session is Focus. One thing all of these pieces share in common is a substantial lack of focus definition. What I notice among all three that seems to be a greatly contributing factor, is your use of colour. Your background colours are derived almost entirely from your render, and aren't adjusted or dulled in many ways. This causes your focal to blend with the background colours, and lose its focus by a substantial amount.
Looking at image 2, my focus is drawn to the right of the focal, instead of to the focus. This is largely due to the fact that the focal does not express any difference from the background. Colours should highlight the focal, rather than absorb the colours, leading to making the image seem extremely flat too. The same thing happens in image 3. The overuse of very similar colours detracts from where the focus should be directed, and again I am drawn to the right of the render, rather than the render itself. This also leads to a loss of depth because the focal blends too much with the background, as the eyes cannot greatly distinguish the focal from the background.
The biggest example of this however is image 1. For a start there is only a small region for the focal as it is, but the incredible similarity of the colours between focal and background really make this piece a shining example of what you need to stop doing. The pink area left of the focal is where my eyes are drawn to most, because that is the area of greatest difference in colours. The amount of effects infront of the render also disturb it somewhat and after the pink, the bottom of the render is where I'm drawn to most of all. Regardless, the focus is lost.
The way to go about rectifying this is to always always always remember that you want your focal to stand out in as many ways as possible. This includes sharpness, contrast (whether your render has more or less, it should stand out) and of course - colour. Overloading your focal with effects doesn't really help either. Effects are supposed to be placed in such a way as to direct your attention to the focal. Everything you do should be done so that it benefits the render without detracting from the rest of the image, to make a cohesive whole. Also note that your focus should take up around 40% of your tag. Small focal's get lost in large backgrounds, so size your tag accordingly.
Onto my next point, which has partially been covered above, but I will go into more detail here.
Depth.
Depth has this funny way of being applied and then negated straight after, and is a problem for me in many of my tags for a long period until I can figure out how to apply it and keep it. The most successful ways of achieving depth are through blurring and lighting, in my opinion. In all your pieces I can see you're already using lighting correctly to achieve some depth, as seen in image 3 where this is used to maximum effect. Sadly the colouring does negate this to quite a large extent, but image 3 is where depth is the most prominent. The sharpness of your background also doesn't help much, but this isn't always an issue. In most cases however, your background should never be as sharp as your focal.
In image 2, your background takes an extreme in the other direction. There is nothing to separate your focal from, and the blurring pulls the focal into your background, however in the centre, the belly of your focal does pop out a little bit, so you do have some slight depth creation there. But it is minimal, and doesn't achieve the effect it should be. The blurring in image 2 occurs mainly around your focal, and on your focal, rather than separate from it. You only want to blur your focal in small places where it blends nicely to make your focal appear to push forwards, where in this case it's done too much so your focal's head arms and lower body all sink backwards. Try not to let this happen. Image 1 is mostly the same as image 2, where the blurring is done way too much.
Last but not least we come to lighting. Here you don't have too much issue, but it could be placed in more coherent places, to really enforce the lighting of your focal, and draw the depth out to the maximum. Most of this actually comes from fitting your background to your focal in such a way that the lighting isn't ambiguous. Having a definitive light source definitely helps with creating depth around a focal, and is much harder to just wipe off again when colours mesh or your background is still sharp. There's not much else to say about lighting other than make sure it's a perfect fit, otherwise it wont create the depth you want, and can be disregarded by other effects and colours.
All in all, you've improved but you're now overusing effects that hinder your pieces rather than help it. Hold off on all the smudging and blurring, and just think extra hard about an effect placement or background. There are many times where I've thought that I've found a decent match, then as I start adding effects and colours I begin to realise the result is awful, and have to start again. It's rare that I get anything right first try, and I spend much of my time retrying my piece until it sits just right.
Text is another issue, and I would advise holding off from text for now, but it's not too bad right now. But since I got a lot of critique on my text, I now spend around half of my time on text alone, and it is definitely the hardest part of a tag to get right. It has to add to the piece, but not detract from the focal. And because letters are easily recognisable to the brain, they are very eye-catching, so keeping it subtle is extremely difficult. Just keep trying, is my advice, and you'll figure out how things work best.
Hopefully you enjoyed this very thorough C&C session. I know it sounds very negative, so I want to reinforce here that what you are making isn't bad in any way, but there is a lot you can improve on, and have been improving on already, so keep at it! The development from your first tag to your most recent is quite astounding, and great to see.