More refinements before going into the concept sheet. I'm finally happy with how the torso part is looking.

Alright so here's a quick update, spent the whole day on this, it was the baroque motifs that took me the most time. I kinda had to wreck my mind to make sense of the rhythm. They are rough but I think that's enough for an illustration.

The major forms are a little harder to read because of all the dense secondary details but I'll clean them up to make the design read better when I do the colors tomorrow.

Windows crashed when I was working on the original concept sheet and the original file got corrupted so I had to redo (kinda) everything. Luckily I had this low res jpeg that I posted on here so I just traced over it. Too bad I feel that I've lost all the energy in the original sketch but at least I didn't lose everything.

Now I can finally work on the illustration piece

Here's a rough sketch for the illustration piece, I'm saving a copy of the psd every hour or so in case windows crash on me again. I've added a halo to her design but I'm not so sure about how fitting is it for her design.

Anyways thank god for the extended deadline, more time for me to get things to look better.
PS. I'm having some banding issues when I use the gradient tool, it isn't really an issue as I will be painting everything by hand but it is a slight annoyance. Any suggestions on how to solve it?

Ahaha, thanks. Yeah I never really cared about it and usually just pain over my gradients

Thank you!!

Sorry for the lack of updates for the past few days, been having an extremely difficult time trying to paint the illustration piece up. Here's a more of a development piece rather than a work in progress of the final piece.

I'm planning to scrap this one and repaint it again from scratch with cleaner line art as there's just a lot that is wrong with this and I'm too invested in this that it's hurting my view of the larger picture. I'm going to have to put some thought into the design of the background to push the narrative. Everything's basically settled into place it's just that I rushed the execution of the piece and panicked and made a mess of everything...

Did a redesign of the secondary details of the character and redesigned the context of the illustration piece. Here's a look at the block out and the line art of the illustration piece.

These are the iterations for the illustration piece. I've lost track of things and I just can't seem to make them work. I think there are some minor anatomy issues to the figure too. I've lost the mood and the vision of the overall feeling that I was initially going for and got sidetracked...

So I'm going to go back to the original sketch with the minimal background and focus back on to the character
(There's still time..... There's still time.....)

DON'T PANIC

Not yet final, quick update.
There's around 3 more hours left and I'm looking around to see if there are a few more places where I can touch up. This is what I have after a roller coaster of confusion, mental fatigue and emotional breakdowns... haha

Done!! I've posted the final illustration and concept sheet to the first post.

This was by far the most challenging thing I've done up to date. I have always lacked the grit and discipline to push through hardships and have always gave up towards the end, which resulted in me not having anything in my portfolio for a little over a year. I almost gave up on this one too, when windows crashed on me and corrupted my psd file. Then I pushed through that which opened up some new sources of inspiration and I decided to redo the whole design, which I ended up loving more then the original one that I intended for this submission. I ran into a lot of walls, doing iterations, painting and repainting the same thing over and over again. I came close to breaking down emotionally, but now I'm glad that I managed to push through. I managed to do something that I can be proud of for myself.

I've learned a lot, and am more excited then ever to continue doing more stuff. This year, I've made a promise to take my art seriously, and this is my first piece of the year.

I would also like to thank all those who came and left a comment or words of encouragement because without those engagement, I would have just quit when it got hard. For once I felt accountable and felt the responsibility of finishing what I've started.
@rgdraw Dude, without you leaving a comment every time I posted an update, I would have gave up when I was panicking over the illustration piece. I really appreciated the engagement and words of encouragement. Thanks!!