even though you posted it in Maemaemae's thread, but I'd like to drop a couple things for it anyway.

To start, this has a good feel, and its going in the right direction, you just need to go a bit farther with it.

One of the first noticeable things is the bigger figure, it seems to have less effort put in to it than the smaller piece. I get this feeling mostly from the spacing of the pieces, the pose of the manikin and the balance of the pose used.
Yeah the balance of the large manikin is really off.

I think you should have had the larger manikin leaning more over the smaller manikin. All to just show his own curiosity of the smaller one's actions.

You should do some posing exercises where you draw poses to try to convey emotions and such with out drawing a face and such.

Another thing that doesn't translate well with both characters is the legs. It looks like there is just one leg. Now, I'm not sure if they are just suppose to have just one leg, or if the appearance of just one leg is intentional, or what is going on.
I think you could benefit from practicing with two legs showing rather than one. it could give your poses a bit more dynamic to play with.

Your lighting on the cylinders is pretty much ok, but it needs some aid else where. Your box off to the left has hardly any shading to it at all. What shading it has says that the light is above it rather than to the left like shown on your figures. Also your ground shadow cast by the box and the larger figure doesn't match the smaller figure which has a much, much longer ground shadow. So you might want to correct that.

So I like the blue, and you got a start, just need a couple tweaks. Good luck