Redesign of a Redesign

The art book is just about finished and I had to rework the cover art. I chose the Kali piece because the color scheme best matched my brand, with the grey and blues. But the original artwork, needed to be revisited.

When I first drew this Kali piece I was very pleased and thought it was one of my better projects and illustrations. A year later after looking at it, I saw many flaws. Things that as a  younger artist I didn't notice, or I simply didn't want to address. There were issues with her anatomy and subtleties in her pose that I reworked.

Normally I am lazy and dont want to redraw a piece but I am learning that redrawing is better than piecing a poorly drawn illustration back together.

I started with redrawing the anatomy. I am a Frank Cho fan.. scratch that DISCIPLE so my initial structure is heavily influenced by his work.

I tend to think my blue lines look better than my final drawings

 I also really like inks over blue line pencils, to me it looks cool.

Final digital inks

I added a tonal value study to get by base values

I then added some general lighting and shadows, followed by tonal adjustments for hue. 

My personal critique is that some of my shadows are still too muddy and dark

 Comparing my original illustration to my current, the anatomical differences are now glaring

Getting in close you can see how lazy my inks were. Now they are still lazy but getting more professional looking.