Wattson's ticklish situation -- Exclusive 10/21 (Patreon)

I don't know -- do you believe her? Do you want to find out? Let me know if you think Wattson is ticklish. ;D

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Thanks to everyone who waited patiently for this one, I really enjoyed doing it... It felt good to revisit a piece that was originally just going to be a one-off sketch, especially since I will never get tired of drawing Wattson.

The sketch itself was pretty refined, so I had an easy time of going over it once with a clean lineart layer. Something I find tricky is when the sketch defines the face quite well, but once I go over it with lineart and then coloring, the face just looks a tiny bit different at the end. It's just a result of working with grayscale for both linework and the shading, as well as the roughness to the sketch brush that results in these little nuances. Still, I am always partial to crisp, clean, digitally-colored pieces, so I made sure to carry over the original expression, while elevating to something with a little more life, especially with the eyes. 

I am most pleased with pieces where I don't go overboard with the background, as well -- sometimes, if the character is a bit sparse in terms of costume details, I will add a few more details to the background, but Wattson's costume has enough details such that it demands the attention on its own. I thus wanted the background to be minimalistic, and simply frame the character, with a nice bright, modern aesthetic, along with some Nessies for fun.

As always, there are variants for those of you with different tastes... I'm always on the lookout for better sock textures, and I really want to find an effective way to warp the texture to the curve of the foot, without it looking too over-engineered. When I'm in doubt, I try and lean towards "less is more", and I try to keep experimentation to a minimum in a single piece, lest it look like a mish-mash of attempted techniques, rather than a cohesive, finished piece.

I haven't yet decided which of the large selection of character ideas I will draw for the next Exclusive (thank you for all the suggestions, please keep them coming!), but for tomorrow and the day after, until I start on that next Exclusive, I'm going to get some sketches out.

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