Lina Redesign Returns Revamped

Alright, story time!

I started work on Lina's redesign late last year, but other stuff came up and I also didn't feel like I had a solid idea of how I wanted to progress with the design at the time, nor did I feel like I really had the skills to pull it off. So I shelved the project for a few months while I took care of other stuff and also gathered a ton of reference materials for things I didn't feel like I knew how to draw well yet.

Smash cut to a month or so ago (can't really remember for sure). I decide I'm finally ready to come back to the project. And rather than continuing where I left off and being shackled to a design I wasn't confident in, I figured it's best to start from scratch and only use elements the previous design to inform the new one.

I actually have very little prior experience or knowledge about drawing women with a "fuller figure", which contributed to my hitting a wall in the previous attempt, and I realized Lina's redesign would be a great opportunity to learn. So I started with how she looks in underwear at all different angles and challenged myself to really do my best to figure out how to get everything looking as solid as possible without taking any shortcuts. It took a LOT of trial and error, as well as studying a LOT of different reference materials because fat is surprisingly very hard to figure out how to get right when just about all you've ever seen detailed art of is skinny people.

I also ended up making a custom model and pose in Clip Studio to help with visualization. The options for editing 3D models in Clip Studio are actually pretty restrictive (like there's no way to specifically change breast or butt size and shape for example, just torso and pelvis size), so the model definitely doesn't look like her. But it does the job well enough to serve as a basic reference for posing.

Anyway, this is what I ended up with for what I deemed a satisfactory initial sketch, and I'm pretty happy with it (for now at least, haha). And for my patrons, I've also decided to include an image of the Clip Studio model I made and used for reference, as well as the most current iteration of the "version 1.5" design I scrapped from before the hiatus, because I figured there's a chance someone might be interested in seeing those.