Toph Heavy Part 3 - Chapter 3 - Page 5 (Patreon)

I'm surprised at how much I like this page - how well it turned out,  how close it was to what I wanted, and how quickly I finished it. 

The difference between this and the last few pages is the lack of masking. I had been (starting with the last page of chapter 2) masking every single muscle group and part of the body for painting.

The layers looked something like this, and keep in mind that this is only about half of Toph's masks, never mind Azula.

For this page, I decided to just drop 90% of the masks. I only created masks as I needed them. Before this, a single page of masks took an entire day, and when I was rendering they would often get in the way. I had to get rid of them. But masks as still useful, so I made only what I needed. This drastically shortened the time of rendering  and I had it almost completely done on Tuesday. In truth, I sat on this for a couple of days thinking "Surely, there's something wrong with this that I'm missing." 

But, no, I really like it.

I think the excess of masks that I was doing boiled down to fear and a lack of confidence. I'm afraid constantly of Patreon numbers going down and I'm thinking "I have to knock every page out of the park."  I put a lot of pressure on myself.

And I think that's the wrong way to be. I think I need to ignore that stuff and do what's comfortable and be confident in the outcome. I think that results in better art.

I dunno if that's interesting to anyone, but I thought I'd share. There may be a minor edit or two to fix something, but this is pretty much done.