Chef Grr (Patreon)

Okay, no high res of this one because I find myself unusually unhappy with it.

There are a number of things to like. I think her expression is great and the wok is good. Some of the ink work looks really nice and clean and stuff.

But the entire image started going south pretty fast for me. It started from a pretty stiff sketch, one that I was trying to figure out on the page. But instead of stopping to rethink any of the pose, I went ahead and started inking. It was a case where I just kept working and adding on top of a pretty poor baseline drawing. There's only so much polish you can put on a bad drawing that it'll still come out as a bad drawing.

Here's like, a dark truth about sketches and final art. A good sketch will become a good drawing with enough rendering and cleaning. But a boring sketch can never become a good drawing unless you change the base sketch itself.

While you can't always sell sketches for as much as you could final, clean, and brilliant art. Sketches should already look good before you start trying to "finish" them. You just can't make a bad sketch look good.