Happy Birthday Miria 2017

pixiv link: www.pixiv.net/member_illust.ph…
🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂
Well, Miria joins the elite club of "characters I have drawn more than once", which only had Illya and (cardcaptor) Sakura in it (unless you count the attempts that never went past sketch, then there are some more). Here's my drawing for her birthday a year ago: www.pixiv.net/member_illust.ph…

I had less than two weeks to draw this, which, with my ultra-fast speed of a slowpoke riding a turtle, isn't a whole lot, so I'm glad I made it in time, even though I probably rushed a bit too much - I should've discarded the first sketch and came up with a better pose/angle/composition, but it's too late now, lol.
Well, I got to play around with a pastel-based color scheme (I wanted to do that for quite a while), refreshed my memory a bit and identified my main weaknesses that I'll focus my attention on... speed being one of them. I used to ignore it since rushing doesn't really help you learn - however, I'm so slow that it's sort of a double whammy on my productivity - my initial burst of enthusiasm/"inspiration" generally runs out long before I'm done, which slows me down even further (and causes things that were done towards the end to be half-assed compared to the ones that were done early).
My goal would be halving the time it takes me to complete a drawing, without any loss in quality (and, of course, improvement instead) by the end of this year - that's quite a stretch, but I think it should be possible if I put more effort specifically into getting faster.