Dist, don't be so rash in judging ganbaru, maybe you are the one who's wrong.
Patch you know I like your work and I'm always honest and straight-forward when it comes to Gfx. I know glowy brushes, fractals and C4D are your style and it goes kinda great. I've seen some really good signatures of yours that have flow and depth, but some like the one ganbaru mentioned lack control.
The render was covered in a mess of brushes, there was no focal, no depth, no flow and it was a bit too crowded. But! practice makes perfect, and even though I'm not a pro myself I always advise people to accept criticism since it's meant to be constructive.
Now I really liked those smudge experiments, they look clean and nice. The one with Eirin I would've changed the color a bit under his neck where the ...splotch is [I hope you get what I mean] and an easy way to do it is just pick a color that goes like blue/purple/teal/cyan and brush with a round soft brush using the blending mode on either Screen, Lighten, Color Dodge or maybe Soft light, see what goes. For better blending you can gaussian blur it a tad xD.
As for depth you can darken the sides just like in the Eirin one using burn tool and also blurring the background/sharpening the focal a bit [for minor sharpening I use high pass -1 of the merged copy layer set on soft light]. But ofc you prolly are aware of that, just be careful with the lightning source ^^
I hope you find this useful, you have a lot of potential, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered ^^". I'll ask you to make me a siggie one of these days ;
Take care, Mitt *huuuuuugs*
Also, Claymore ftw!