July art request (Procreate) sketch dump!

Welcome, everyone, to the biggest dump yet of sketches drawn in response to Patrons' suggestions for content, as solicited on a monthly basis. Here, I'm lumping together previously separate July art requests from all Patrons and the big spenders of the $5 and $10 tiers.  (Hope the latter folks don't mind!) 

Two weeks ago, I screwed up my drawing arm whilst grinding out the high-intensity pencils for an Empowered vol. 12 page.  Since then, the only form of sketching I've been able to eke out has been via the iOS art app Procreate, which I've found seems to inflict a bit less pain on my ailing arm.  So, as part of my ongoing campaign to familiarize myself with the process of working digitally, I cranked out all these sketches as test-bed experiments in Procreate. 

Above is the last and arguably most successful of the series so far, featuring characters from a number of different art requests. (Though, some might prefer my earlier July sketch set of Hopper from Stranger Things, I suppose.)  I was experimenting with a few different new brushes here, not to mention the app's text feature.

Below is a rather less successful set, but what the heck.  (Yeahp, those are supposed to be Roxy and Caitlin from Wildstorm/DC's Gen13, along with the titular heroine from the late-90s anime Armitage III.)  For several of these, I was attempting to emulate the approaches of several different artists who render anime/ manga-influenced facial structures with semi-realistic(?) shading:   

Also, for the first time, I was experimenting with using my beloved "medium hard airbrush" Procreate brush at different value settings and opacity levels, as seen further in the next one:

The Galacta parts of the set above kinda sucked, but this was still a worthwhile test of using inking brushes to render hair and eyelashes.  My beloved medium-hard airbrush is, alas, notso-hotso at rendering either of those, though it's pretty sweet in other ways (as seen in the lower three photoreferenced sketches).

One art request was for Empowered's Ninjette fighting with Kei from Dirty Pair, so I cranked out a dashed-off, 15-minute comic-page rough along those lines: 

In the first two panels, behold my very first app-assisted attempts at speed lines, using Procreate's perspective drawing guide mode.  Huzzah!  Also, gotta say that panel 3's vertical montage of three martial-arts moves is an interesting approach—as opposed to using three separate panels, which might've run afoul of the layout shibboleth of "don't place multiple panels on the left next to a single panel on the right, lest reading order become confusing." 

Additionally, the Kei close-up in the background of panel 4 is a neat way to get around the fact that we're not seeing her face in the main shot.  Some halfway decent ideas, must admit, for such a hacked-out little rough!  (I might try something a little more elaborate, next time.)

BTW, below is the photo I was using for martial-arts reference, from a book on Shaolin chin na (aka Chinese trapping/locking/grappling techniques):

Finally, two July art requests mentioned characters for which I'd drawn con sketches years ago, so I've included 'em in this sketch dump as well. First up is a 2006(!) pic of Aeryn Sun from the SF TV show Farscape, seen here as a rather threatening nurse:

And next up is Jun from Gatchaman (or Princess from Battle of the Planets, I suppose), in a con sketch drawn a decade later: 

(For the record, I stumbled through another three Procreate sketch sets this weekend, but as those are pieces from the higher-tier project Hushed Half-Elf, they'll go in a separate post for the $5 and $10 folks; stand by for that later on today, big spenders!)

Anyhoo, that's it for July's art requests, folks!  They were a surprisingly fun bunch, despite the limitations imposed by my effed-up drawing arm.  Little by little, I'm learning more and more about working digitally, though I clearly have a loooooong way to go before I can produce any publishable work in this format.  Onward, though!