I hate being sick. So. MUCH.

It was my turn to give a challenge for my art exchanges with Bryant, so I decided on women warriors.  It should have been easy-peasy - I like women, I like armor, and I like women.  I should have had this in the bag, right?

Right?

Well, between Dragon Age 2 coming out, beating that once and starting a second playthrough, getting the influenza and being down and out for 5+ days, and trying to recover from that and/or a secondary cold/sinus infection/whatever that hitchhiked its way into my body, it ended up taking a lot longer than I thought.  Like, 2 weeks longer.

First off, here's the final version:

 

I used ref for the armor, as the goal (for me, at least) was to draw a female warrior with armor that looked solid, useful, able to protect, etc etc.  The pose and face and stuff was from my imagination, as was the sword and the lazy shield.  As ridiculous as this sounds, the part I'm most proud of is that I added her head after I drew the rest of the body... and it looks decent.  I usually have to start drawing the head first, or it gets all messed up later.  I started using 2H lead to lay stuff out, and then solidify the lines I want with H lead.

This was my first pass:

Boring, huh?  I used ref for the armor, but I didn't like pretty much anything about it.  So I tried again.

I liked this one a lot more, but my lines were so heavy and dark that I got frustrated from lead smearing all over the place, so I thought I'd just start over again.  I think that worked out in the end.

I did some other sketches while working on this - here's some Dragon Age 2 fanart I did while sick:

Random faces - there's the Arishok, Isabela (twice!), an elf, and a shitty dwarf face, along with some other random crap ('sup Frank Castle?).  Also, there's a mini-Qunari-Blanka fusion.

This second batch of faces includes Sebastian Vael, a Desire Demon, F!Hawke, Loki from Thor (kinda), and some other random people.

We have an elf, a dwarf, two F!Hawkes, an alien thing, and some other faces.  Oh, and a torso.  Hawt.

I also have two sketches of F!Hawke (I picked the mage class for my second playthrough).  I love her default face.  LOVE IT.

Anyway, this first sketch is F!Hawke resting after a hard day.  Yes, that is lipstick on her cheek :3 (I romanced Isabela ASAP because she's just so much fun)

This is a sketch of F!Hawke getting ready to fireball the darkness.  Pew pew!

I have some other sketches too, but they're all studies (and two of them are kind of NSFW), so they'll stay in my sketchbook for now.