DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Enjoy the WORK STAGES chronicling my descent into commissioned crossover madness (part 2)! (Patreon)

[Part 1 of this post can be seen here.]

The piece that follows isn't technically a commission per se, but rather a gift illo for a friend of time and long-time (small-P) patron. He wanted a sketch of Dirty Pair's Kei and Yu—nay, Rose & Lily in a distressed-damsel crossover with a specific iteration of a familiar character from a very different franchise; though you might not be able to spot the resemblance, the character in question was the Sean Connery iteration of James Bond.

In the first image of this post, I'll repeat the Work Stage where we left off with our previous installment:

I did not like the way that the Bond face worked out with Wacom Cintiq "inking" on the PC, so I transferred the Clip Studio Paint file over to my tablet and redid his face with my beloved Design Pencil brush; note also that I changed Lily's face (at right) from the perfectly adequate "blue-pencil" version after failing in my first stab at inking said face.

Here's the same Work Stage with the blue-pencil underdrawing layer turned off:

Note that the illo loses something ineffable with the underdrawing removed. 

By this point, however, I was deeply annoyed by Lily's redrawn face, so I went back to the underdrawing layer and made a second attempt at inking the original version:

And for our final Stage, I added some rather awkward shading as the illo was transferred back to my PC for the final push:

By this time I was so g-d sick of this piece that I didn't bother to sign or date it, let alone add any damsel-y "mmph"-ing or add any quippage by Sean/ Bond. Ah, but this theme was not yet done, as subsequently I made a second stab at Life Drawing from a more striking Sean/ Bond photo, to which I later tried to add a bedamseled Rose.

Furthermore, my initial struggles with the male figure caused me to haul off and buy some of those wee Japanese manikins as reference sources, which proved surprisingly useful for establishing figure interactions. So, you $5+ folks can expect to see s'more Distressed Damsels sketch sets down the road based on this premise and reffed from those manikins, okay? (Srsly, some of the poses proved shockingly useful.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea at present as to exactly what's coming up in the next M/W/F slot, folks. Let's find out together, shall we?