Here goes with my yeti house! I'm learning a lot by participating. Good luck everyone!

Hello everyone! I'm new here at SVS, bingeing on the podcast and getting tons of great info from these forum posts. Thank you to all the friendly and hardworking artists here!
I've spent the past few weeks exploring the possibility of a career transition to illustration. I've been a scenic artist and set designer for the past 17 years, painting and designing scenery for live theater. In that line of work, your paintings are prized for their versatility of style, not for their consistency of style.
So I've been sketching in gouache and pen and ink and Procreate for the past few weeks, trying to get comfortable working in my natural style and learning how to compose images with compelling characters. Here's a collage of some recent explorations. Each a sketch is between 2 and 5 hours of work, and originals around 8 inches max. I'd love some encouragement about what things are working well right now!
Thanks in advance!
Val

I've been thinking about the new Mars rover, and I imagined it had a personality, and wound up with this. I'm in love with it.

In under the wire! Thank you to everyone who shared such helpful advice while I was working on this, and even if I didn't follow all the excellent advice, I'm thankful for it. You all are so inspiring.

Doing a digital rework of an acrylic painting I made for my nephew last summer, adding characters, trying to control focal points.

@mellanrumsformer I took your suggestion of turning the raccoon's head, and in the process discovered a pose for her that I think looks friendlier.

Here's my cleaned up line drawing, and my value thumb (which for some reason is huge.) Getting ready to start developing shadows over the line drawing now.

I am living vicariously through all of your amazing beautiful art mascots. Thank you so much for sharing these! Here's my bird-legged houseplant, which is the closest thing I've got over here in my no-pets apartment.

Finally got some time to revisit this project. I spent a few evenings working this up from background to foreground. I'm ready to start some color adjustment, and fine tuning. Some things I plan to work on are the expression in the fox's eyes (looking out of frame right now) and the raccoon's color, which was just more interesting in my color studies. What else do you all think would help pull it together?

I think my 10 step digital painting class experiment might be finished? 95% finished? I left it alone for a few days and came back to it with fresh eyes to make adjustments to color and expressions. I'm feeling like working through this class was a big step forward for me, and I'm looking forward to more. Thanks for all the invaluable feedback, everyone!

Hello all! I'd love to hear some reactions on this rough sketch for the Yeti Cooking prompt. Is it readable? Is the yeti likeable, and can we tell that she's really enjoying herself?
And most importantly, should I ditch this '3 moments floating in clouds of aroma' idea? The main feedback I got from Jake and Will in last night's Critique Arena is that I had way too much going on. I sort of think I can pull this together so it doesn't look crazy busy, but generally I do have a tendency to think more is more.

Doing a digital rework of an acrylic painting I made for my nephew last summer, adding characters, trying to control focal points.

Hello, welcome Madeline! Everyone is super friendly and willing to help with feedback and recommending classes here. It's a great place to learn.

@Asyas_illos She's really cute, Asya! I like the head to body proportion that you chose for her, and I think you're on a great track. I think you could maybe go further with the design of her accessories to give more hints about what kind of world she lives in. Maybe it's the shape of her knife, or a pattern on her bag, or some special tool that would make sense in her environment. Also, you could show some more character by making sure the facial expressions of the 3/4 front pose and the running pose are a bit more different from each other.

I'm also voting for 5! All beautiful work, but the witch in 5 looks dominating and powerful.

I am living vicariously through all of your amazing beautiful art mascots. Thank you so much for sharing these! Here's my bird-legged houseplant, which is the closest thing I've got over here in my no-pets apartment.

Hello, @Julia-Hegetusch lovely to meet you, and lovely work! I love the way you're using textures in the dog and cat piece. Excited to see more of your work!

Hello, welcome, Isabel!
I can answer a little bit of the voting question: I think it's usually the second Thursday of each month, but I could be off about that. They've been announcing it on their Instagram and Facebook a few days beforehand. There will probably also be some conversation about it in the monthly contest thread in a week or so. If you're an SVS member, you'll get an email with a link in it the day of the voting. I think non members can join to watch but not vote via their Facebook page.

In under the wire! Thank you to everyone who shared such helpful advice while I was working on this, and even if I didn't follow all the excellent advice, I'm thankful for it. You all are so inspiring.

Hello! Welcome, @Ash-Lamb, and thanks for sharing your piece!

I love where you're going with this. It looks great!