Allow me to share my current solution in the face of serious psychiatric problems! Since I'm not gonna let that stuff stop me from making art, I learned something I've always wanted to learn: sculpting, painting, and rigging characters in Blender. I've been using Blender anyway for my backgrounds, so this seemed like a logical next step.
I've spent the last few years or so quietly practicing sculpting in my spare time, and figuring out what my characters look like in 3D. Flash forward, and we have what I'm sharing here!
What you're seeing is my model of Prince Kefran, the hero of a comic I want to do entitled "The Lion Prince." I'll show a full workflow example soon where I turn this image into a finished pinup. The current images and their progression is to show how I'm able to use a rigged and posed model to generate a perfect layer of flats, ready for use in Photoshop, where I'll then add lines and do a full paintover. This process removes the needs to sketch, and makes it far easier to achieve good poses and camera angles.
I'll be sharing MANY more species and characters that I've built and rigged, so please standby for more!