I like drawing quick (1- or 2-hour) portrait shots to reinforce the lessons I've been learning and changes I've been making in my art process. Over the past month or so that process has become a little more painterly, and I'm very happy with the results. Besides just getting more comfortable with these brushes, I can chalk it up to basically two things: emphasizing detail in critical regions (eyes, nose, mouth...) and de-emphasizing it elsewhere; and being less precious with my layers. The result relies less on clean linework to hold onto the initial energy of the sketch and more on shape and volume, which has not always come so naturally to me.
And so yeah, I drew this otter girl as prep for the Juno pic I teased in the last post. Hope you like her :)