In case you missed the journal, I had a few compounding factors leading to the delay here. First is the magical C-word virus :D -- Had symptoms all weekend.
Second, I was putting in a huge amount of time and effort into this one. I Put close to 7 Hours on Saturday doing a handful of sketches and the finished lineart. Then shading kept me busy for another 6-7 hours.

**[IMPORTANT]**
I wanna preface this: I used this artwork by   AnnetPeas as a VERY heavily sourced reference for this. https://www.furaffinity.net/view/55136632/
(I also referenced commissions I've ordered from her in the past: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/48792798/ )

I fell in love with her cinnabon sketch, and LOVED the idea of trying to recreate this with my own kitty. I am ABSOLUTELY NOT claiming the pose/design/concept/style here. None of my practice sessions have covered anatomy/proportions/character drawings, so I decided I'd take some time to study a style I adore and learn how to recreate it until I can re-learn enough about digital art to do more of my own style freeform.

Here's the process I used:
1. Break down both my references into their basic construction -- shape for the head. shape/angles/position of the ears, shoulders, hips, hair, tail, hands/feet, knees, etc. I did end up tracing the basic shapes over the reference images with transparency
2. I then hid the original references, and tried to redo the construction freehand for both
3. Finally, I did a new sketch using the cinnabon pose, using the construction elements unique to my kitty (such as pointier ears)
4. I then went very hardcore on the lineart. I'm acutally super happy with how the lineart turned out on its own. I think I might post a black&white lineart version to my scraps too. I made a very proactive effort to draw varied line weights, and get more deliberate about where thick&thin lines go. I especially put a lot of effort into trying to get thick-thin-thick and thin-thick-thin pressure gradients within my lines for added flair (similar to my old traditional art style)
5. I finally used the color picker to grab the colors from my character, and used that airbrush technique I've been using to play with

---

My Self-Critique

Things that went well
1. I did a VERY good job with the lineart. I spent a lot of time trying to get it to be as close to my original style as I could possibly get, and I feel like I did finally achieve that goal -- getting my lineart digitally to match my traditional lineart again. Finally feeling like I'm starting to get back to where I was (so that "real learning" can begin soon)
2. I tried out a new technique of coloring the lines. There was definitely some things that I still need to learn with it, but it does really help make the finished piece look a bit more... natural?
3. I'm super happy with how the shading on her pants and her hair turned out. Of all the parts, those were my favorite. I very much struggled to shade her body, and I just couldn't get a good cel shading that I was happy with, but that gradient played really well on those shiny surfaces

What didn't go well (room for improvement
1. My body shading, especially on the tail, feels mostly haphazard and sloppy. Only a few locations for the shading felt deliberate, the rest feels like it was just slapped in to add a bit of variety to the overall texture. I feel like I woulda been a lot happier with those if I was a bit more deliberate with the whole thing
2. Even though I'm super proud of the lineart I did, I'm starting to realize that the style I had previously is more manga-esque, and doesn't lend itself well to being colored. I think the first thing I can do to improve this is to make the lineart even thinner, so that the lines aren't fighting with the colors. Additionally, I have a habit of adding excessive lineart detail & "spikey" shapes, which I believe
3. I had a big issue where the png export of the image lost out a lot of detail. It ended up much blurrier, and lost a lot of the shading detail that I spent so much time on. I started on a 2560x1440p canvas with 300dpi, but since it shared canvas space with the refs, I ended up having to crop the final piece to ~800x800. I know that's small, but Clip Studio tricked me, since the level of detail on the image in the software gets a lot smaller and more fine-tuned than the final export ended up having. I'm very annoyed that this discrepancy exists -- "if it goes so sharp and detailed in the software, why can't I export it with that same level of resolution?". Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I eventually gave up at this point, and tried exporting with 400% scaling in an attempt to preserve some of the detail I worked so hard on -- lesson learned, Work with a canvas that's at least twice as big as you think you need, since you'll have to leave room for your refs (or try and figure out how to make reference windows). I also struggled since they were all Raster layers, so I couldn't just do any easy "vector layer" scaling
4. Very unhappy with how LONG the whole process took. Considering how much emphasis I was putting on speed last week, I'm disappointed with myself how quickly I disregarded the speed practice when I actually wanted to put it to use on a real piece. 15+ hours is not something I should expect of myself every week, especially when I was trying to budget in roughly an hour or two for these weekly showcase pieces. I don't want to push expectations too far. I was inspired this time, but I definitely don't want to make a habit of sinking my whole weekend into it -- I have other hobbies too

So for Week 3, my initial goal was bodies/anatomy/facial structure, but after such a pore time-budgeting performance, I'm going to go 100% into getting faster this week