Letting a sketch get out of hand (wip but also done?)

Ok, this will be an odd one.

I have had a pretty bad habit of shading pieces that were never intended to be shaded. I like colors too much, and once im in ~the zone~ on a piece I convince myself "it wont take THAAAAT long to add".

Sometimes thats true! This piece honestly went fine with shading, the only woes I ran into came from the fishnets. Turns out I dont know how to draw fishnets for my life, and I was hopelessly lost until I did a bit of poking about CSP's market and foundd a free brush / tutorial specifically for that! It took like 15 minutes after that- actually kind of amazing just how much time I could be saving by just using CSP's tools better.

Ah well! At least with the fishnets the sketch is done, and with a little shading!

...sketch... right, so. Theres 3 images attached, and I dont know if "sketch" applies anymore. Once I had my little breakthrough on fishnets, I wanted to see what else I could speed up using new CSP tools- the first fruit of that effort was the background on the sketch. Neat! I can just drop patterns on a whim and apply them to make quicker background art. You wouldn't believe the asinine process I went through on some of those dot rooms- this would have been a life saver.

Of course... I didnt want to just stop at a basic background, I saw a tree when looking around and the commission was supposed to have a late-night clubbing vibe so why not see if I cant use a few assets to turn this brick wall into something? Of course... the assets are colored... so I might as well take the time to pick out the proper shading colors and make this pop a bit more.

But then... its not a night club if I have the lighting set at day.... how about I just take a selection of my shading regions, invert them, and set up a glow region so I could do a night colors shot with the nearby club casting colorful lights onto the character. Oh man I sure do love colors, I think this tree needs some love and my brushes arent well equipped to make a tree without some planning and effort. One search in the asset store later and I have a full set of leaf brushes to play with and now the colors are all coming together and oh man this is such a great...

sketch...

Riiiight. Again, this was a sketch comm. It still is, and for what its worth the sketch comm is done. Like, that piece up there fulfills my sketch tier criteria. But this colored pieces was coming out so well and I dont want to just not finish it... so... uh, I will finish it! But not right now.

Getting through my queue is more important than meddling about with cool new toys in CSP. Still, I'm glad I did meddle because I learned a fuck ton of shortcuts tonight- but theres more work to get done and an already-finished comm doesent need to be more finished.

Cause of the weirdness- I'm technically counting this as a finished upload for the sketch tier comm, but I will be giving it a proper repost when the cool colorful version is done. So uh, if you've never seen one of the wip posts before- hooray! You get a little freebie. I do not usually write this much but I always like to give some kind of breakdown to what I was thinking while making the things. Least I can do is give some insight into why exactly im a mess during this art drought

Speaking of which, I should return to making the things. Slowly but surely chipping away at projects. Brains are dumb and my work is erratic, but when stuff like the above monolith of text is being read out in my head all day long- i'll just be happy for any art project it can piece together coherently

Love ya'll <3