When ideas go stale

Holy moly, I had an idea for a proper long comic in the shower today (I swear that's where I get all of my good ideas). This NEVER happens!
Possibilities kept popping up so I jotted them down quickly. All of a sudden I had an interesting premise to build on and 10 characters on my hands, all in the matter of an hour or so. Now I just hope that this will continue to seem like a good story. Usually my story ideas tend to lose their sparkle when they lose their freshness, and in the end I'm convinced that it was a bad idea to begin with. And that's as far as it goes.

This is not really an art post but it would be interesting to hear if anyone else has had this experience and what you do about it.

Gesture

It's been a while since I did figure drawing and it shows... My plan is to go back to basics again, starting with gesture and eventually moving onto form and anatomy.

Gesture looks deceptively simple but is probably the hardest and most important part to grasp. If the gesture is right then everything else just seems to fall into place.

Warm-up

I keep forgetting how great music can be for inspiration. When I work on stuff that requires less concentration I put on a podcast to keep me company. As I was doing some warm-up sketches this morning I put a podcast on by habit. This one was an interview with an artist representative. It took me a while to realise that the voices talking about the nitty gritties of the field was actually making me quite tense. I guess some times we just have to switch off the real world for a bit.

I'm loving Ludovico Einaudi at the moment. You can really let your mind drift away on his scores...

Elizabethan-Japanese Crit

Hey :) Sorry for putting up a whole new post for this, but it was really hard to arrange in the comment section. I like the image, but I think the problem that struck me first was actually the breasts! They don't look affected by the corset (or gravity) at all.

I think the arm looks too short not because it's the wrong length, but because the upper body and head is pulling back in an unusually tense manner, meaning that the pose doesn't let her left arm seem like it's pushing away from the body as it tugs the hair.
I've tried to demonstrate what I mean by going over the pose, revealing the underlying anatomy (ignoring the breasts to show the ribcage). I think her left thigh also seems a little too short.

The right is a redraw with a few attempted corrections, and the middle shows how the pose shifts to pull the opposing shoulder, neck and head away from the stretched out hand. I've made the corset cinch the waist more, since it didn't seem to be affecting her body-shape in the original, and given her right calf more shape, since it would be squashed against the thigh. With legs bent like that, the garter straps wouldn't be straight either (otherwise the clasp would just be pulled off when she straightened up), and the curvature of the stockings needed to support the shape of the legs a little better to help the foreshortening.

EDIT: Whoops, it was Elizabethan, not Victorian, title edited. And I guess she's not actually ninja either.

Elizabethan-Japanese-RPG-character?

I was so surprised to find this under a stack of old sketches. I actually can't remember when or what prompted me to draw it... it must've been a late night zombie state sketch.
The arms might be a bit short... I already moved them once but I'm wondering if it might not have been enough, especially the arm that's outstretched. I had foreshortening in mind but it might not have worked... Opinions? :)

Mmm...mango

Development sketches

These are some thumbnails and discarded ideas for a commission that I'm working on. I wanted to incorporate the Yin Yang symbol into the design but in the end it wasn't clear enough and didn't serve the purpose of the artwork.