I actually drew this as a way to practice posing and flat color, to expand my options and not relying on polished rendering anymore.
I started working on this in January 2023, slowly sketching out the poses. Each week I would spend anywhere from 30min-10hours on this.
Good things:
compared to last year, I'm more comfortable sketching fullbody.
I spended more time on the 3 fullbody poses. I'm getting better at imaginative and constructive pose drawing.
I really like the layout, especially the big portrait on right side. The size contrast in this artwork is really on point. I intent to polish this further as a commission sample of this specific look (flat color, character-centric, multiple angle and pose of the same character)
Facial expression is improving too.
My gradient game has been improving though still kinda bad. I used to hate gradients with a passion.
Neutral:
My "perfectionist self" dislike many parts of this artwork and objectively speaking this looks worse than the average quality of my works. But considering this is essentially a passion work (this is not a commission), it is good that I was able to curb the perfectionist, make many compromises and decided to stop at an acceptable quality. I still feel very bad uploading this work but well I still got 1 more commission to do so can't spend too much time orz
Bad:
Because of my underestimation, I had to rush a lot of details towards the end.
The time constraint destroyed my focus ability, I wasn't able to apply the clean sketch skill that I've acquired in my studies and just reverted to my old habit of not thinking before making a mark.
Color looks acceptable while zoomed in, but a mess while zoomed-out, I used Color Burn too excessively as a way to separate the fullbody poses and everything else and it backfired.
I switched to a more Orderly Workflow (on the spectrum of Chaos vs Order in Art Workflow) for this artwork, and aimed for a clean look (as opposed to a more painterly look) and frankly didn't do a good job. The sketchiness of the line, the ragged edges that is ok in a painterly look are very apparent in this clean look.
The thumbnail also suffer from the difficulty in Editability🌱. While I have more control for each individual layer in an orderly workflow, it is a expensive decision if I ever want to apply a global adjustment layers (which has harmonizing effect) as I always do in my usual chaotic workflow.
Overall, this artwork has plenty potential to be my best work, but was hampered by time constraint and my lack of practice in an Ordered workflow. I really love the clear improvement in posing and 3d forms. The content and layout is really lively and cute too~