Gym Babe

Jokes aside, here's the illustration. It's pretty good.

Wanted to practice coloring, instead did the best secondary forearm anatomy of my life. Everything I wanted came across, from the pose to the mild look of distaste on the subject's face. Why am I like this?

This took about 7-8 hours over the course of an entire weekend. I didn't push myself too hard, thankfully, and had fun. Some takeaways:

• Flat colors are very cool and good, but my shape and line control leaves a lot to be desired. It's pretty messy. The core shadow-subsurface scattering technique is pretty useful. Will I ever study rendering? Yes. But right now, I'm having a lot of success with this technique, which is easy and convenient.
  
• Use reference 100% of the time.
• My composition is weak and I end up using tricks like vignetting and blur to prop it up.
• Next time I want to study color, do the following two things to make sure I'm not unfocused:
• Copy from a better artist. I can learn to invent color when I understand it better.
• DON'T WASTE TIME ON BACKGROUNDS YOU FOOL!

I'm happy I can make stuff that looks good at this point! I'd like to push for 1 finished illustration per weekend but who knows if I can keep that pace up.