Strawberry Dress Old WIPs (Patreon)

I've been requested by some backers to share old WIPs and thumbnails, so I'm starting to dig around my old files and screenshots! First, this gift art that I did for a friend, of her girlfriend wearing Lirika Matoshi's strawberry dress.

1) I drew 8 possible poses to let my friend pick one. Normally I don't thumbnail a bunch of different poses for my personal art, I usually just pick one from the get go and run with it. But I figured that since it wasn't my original design and I didn't need to showcase the entire dress, I could at least spruce it up with an interesting pose. She ended up picking 5, I'm lowkey relieved she didn't pick any of the sitting poses LOL

2) A closer look at pose 5. 

3) After finalizing the lineart, I slapped on colors very roughly to get an idea of how to render all the tulle. This was when I was experimenting with the black eyes, but my friend wasn't a fan which is why I ditched them entirely.

4) The final drawing without any paper textures. I was slowly phasing out the pencil sketch texture, but I did decide to keep it for the dress only. I think it'll be useful to bring back here and there.

5) The final artwork with filters and background.

Unfortunately the post didn't get as many likes on social media as my usual stuff, and I remember being so disappointed because at the time I finished this drawing I was so happy with how it turned out, it was the first time I'd loved my art in a very long time. Maybe it's because it wasn't an original design and the strawberry dress was no longer trendy, I don't know. 

It's been 4-5 months since I finished this artwork, and looking back I actually enjoy the dress more on a white bg than a color bg. It pops more, I think? Not that I regret the switch to color bgs, but I wonder if there's anything I could have done to help this post perform better 😅