Oh snap

Okay, this whole 'not doing any digital painting' would be a lot easier if I wasn't so obsessive.

I was told by a few people that I should start in black and white. I also figured that starting with rooms wasn't a great idea seeing as I'm considerably better at organic stuff than inorganic.
This was done using a rough pencil sketch from my sketchbook. Obviously it's not an ideal sketch to use, as it was drawn with stylised proportions. Personally I'm not a huge fan of painterly styles applied to manga proportions, as the more realistic lighting and texturing combined with unrealistic proportions creates a strange 'uncanny valley' effect. My manga style doesn't deviate hugely from real proportions, but her head looks a little too big (unless she's 5'1", of course, my head:body ratio is about the same as hers, 1:6.5), and her eyes I had to paint smaller than I'd drawn them, they looked freaky hahaha! I used the sketch mainly just because this was purely a quick technical exercise.
It's not perfect. The contrast isn't confident for a start, and the light direction isn't distinct enough. Starting in monochrome is a good start though, and I didn't use brush opacity this time, and was more confident and free flowing.

Hmmm...perhaps I should give digital painting the screens a shot...