Not dynamic enough.Sketch number 2... 
I liked this a lot better, but the angle might be wrong since it's making her look large, when she should be looking weak.
Sketch number 3...
Too strong.(I thought of a different direction to the scene, but no).
Sketch number 3...
This is a better angle, but a crappier drawing. It would have been difficult to get the image looking as good as the second, so I chose to keep with a less frightening angle, but more detail in the form itself. Sketch number 2 wins.
I trace this onto tracing paper, putting details in as I go (and as I think of them)...
Turns out she's a school girl. How about that, eh? The gun was a crazy last minute add-on. I thought: Whatever's chasing her will be massive, and if I ever get to a third iteration of this scene I want her to fire at it with something. A ridiculously huge machine gun was the obvious choice.
This is a progression of detail. What I learnt during this process is that to get this look I needed to futz with the brush options. Even though you don't see it in the final product (below) I managed to replicate this look by putting a canvas texture within the brush option itself instead of using a canvas-type brush. Big difference.
The easiest way to do this (that I could find) is to open a new file, put a texture filter over a white page (canvas), then find the edges of this tiled texture. Crop this, then save this as a texture (define pattern). This will then show up in the brush options. Viola!
In the end, I finished this image simply to finish it. The look I was going for I never managed to get, and so the Todd Harris experiment was ...essentially... a failure in the ultimate sense, but I did learn a little about brush techniques. So it wasn't a total failure. Small steps for now.
Addendum:
Milenko, you provided a clear vision with your quick critique in the comments section. Thanks! I always take good criticism as art direction so I was very interested to see what the image would look like pushed a bit further. I think it's a definite improvement, but I'm still not 100% with it for some inexplicable reason. As artists are their own worst critics then I'm doing fairly well to be only this disappointed with it. :) Thanks again.
