Kobold Painting Process and Coming up with Concepts

Here's some process on a character illustration, it took around 10 hours total. I'm planning to do a series of these kobold characters.

I wanted the culture of the kobolds to be tribal and underdeveloped - they're sort of like cave monsters, living and mining underground. While mining or exploring caves, they stumble upon relics of an ancient civilization and start dressing in their armor and using their tools. I want this other civilization to be sort of medieval European (particularly in the knightly ornamental armor designs), and to worship a sun cult/god, so all the decoration and engravings would be based off of that. The kobolds are fascinated with this cult and use candles/fire as a replacement for the sun, so they fuse the candle holders onto pieces of armor. The character of the candle-maker could also be a priest or shaman.

Here's a sketchbook page where I wrote some things down and came up with the concept:

I started with just an idea that I wanted to make some kind of a candle character, and I researched how candles are made. Then I was looking at different light sources used in the medieval times (like torches and lamps), and came up with an association with a sun cult, which is generally how I come up with ideas - at first they tend to be very vague and/or generic, so I start googling and watching videos and somewhere down the line come up with a better association and keep building onto that.  I think the idea of having an ancient more developed culture also came from researching sun cults and symbols.

Now, I don't really like this painting, mainly because I did the armor separately thinking it would be good to show both how the kobold would look in his caveman rags, and with the added armor, but the end result came out just looking disjointed to me. It could also have something to do with the design of the armor straps, it's pretty poor. Either way, I'll most certainly do another version of this character in a different style, perhaps something more simple, with lineart. If I like that, the rest of the characters will fit into that style of execution, and if not, I'll have to do some more experimentation.