I blew up the resolution to 300 and used an 32x18 inch canvas (I know). Never again!
This roast spent two days in the oven, and half of that time--more than half--was just waiting for my five year old dinosaur of a laptop to stop holding my brush icon hostage! The loading times were so excruciating, and so inconsistent, I would spam the save button on my hot key bar just to get slapped--five-ten-fifteen fucking minutes later!--with a window telling me the system can't save my progress; bc it's already saving my progress; but hhhhow would I know!? Constantly the loading wheel would just vanish and my whole screen would seize up, including my mouse.
There were times when my computer was shitting itself so vociferously-- so unabashed in its autism-- I had to wait half a minute between brush strokes; halfway through this OC I was painting blind. And the Liquify tool...! My fucking God, the Liquify tool.
If I so much as zoomed in too quickly the whole Liquify window would have a stroke, slap me with an error window, and, no matter how many times I tried deleting it, or hitting 'Okay!', that little shit would psychotically pop up and refuse to go the fuck away. In the past two days, during at least twelve hours of what should have been recreational artistry, I resorted to ctrl+alt+delete at least ten times (bare minimum!); and suffered untold hours, constantly waiting for my Lenovo to get its life together, as a direct result.
I never used more than a dozen layers at any time; and less for most of the drawing's composition. Even when I flattened this beast my laptop needed a whopping 15 minutes to compute that, yes, I wanted to export it as a jpeg; no, I didn't to save any changes made to the reference pictures pinned to the side of my screen; and, yes, please, for the love of Christ, close Photoshop so I never have to open this file again!
All that said, the face is a marked improvement from the last run, MUCH more feminine ,and definitely Asiatic--- but the expression is 'Meh!'-- and the pattern on her dress is just...frustrating to even glance at, frankly; because I know how many hours I spent trowling You Tube for any method to add patterns to clothing without Warping--because, obviously, that wasn't going to work, but, no matter what prompt I rattled into You Tube's search bar, over and over and OVER again I would get the exact same damn Copy+Paste+Warp tutorials. The same dead end. I tried doing it by hand but it's so hard!
I look at this drawing and all I think is, 'I could have done this in a fraction of the time; if only I knew how to fucking draw hands!' So much time, pissed away in the miserable pursuit of just one--one single solitary viable pose with legible hands I could mask--because I can't draw hands from scratch; I can't...! I haven't learned enough to make them look decent, so, I don't draw them cold. Ever. When I do they're too mannish, they're too stiff, they're too broken; they're just...wrong. Not stylized, just ugly, and I hate drawing them.
I'm coming off breathlessly contemptuous of this drawing (I'm not). No, my agro is devoted exclusively to my goddamn laptop; for being an ass-on-backwards braindead geriatric that makes me want to field dress a unicorn in front of a war orphan.
Hmm. I sympathize with lousy tech. Still, the part about developing drawing skills resonates with me more strongly. Short term fix on one hand; long term fix on the other. For the latter, one learns to love the process, which is long and tedious. Some will say that the tedium is part of the charm.
Not to touch a nerve but looking at the left-side arm: with the shoulder raised (shrugged up), the hand would rest higher on the leg; its being pulled up, not extending with shoulders relaxed. Since the forearm is disproportionately long, simply reducing it with transform would shorten it enough to solve the problem. (Given normal proportions, the length of wrist to elbow is shorter than that of elbow to shoulder.)