"The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you've come."- A generic motivational quote, because I couldn't express it better.
This was probably the first ever tutorial that I made. I tried to make my own Patreon page, but my attempt utterly failed. I definitely do not regret trying, because luck is about playing the odds.
This was clearly inspired inspired by a Feng Zhu youtube tutorial 
I was browsing through my old art folders and came across the collection of my studies from 2015. You can open the image in new tab to see the close up.
I definitely had way less patience back then, I thought quantity over quality would help me improve faster. Now I'm certain that was wrong approach, because instead of learning new techniques I was mostly repeating similar steps, without pushing it further.
I have many, many more old studies/ attempted concept art, let me know if you'd like me to compile some more :)
Sadly I lost nearly all of references that I used back then. Now I try to collect most of the art on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/kristinaglas/
The following is my original character design from 2015. I reused the creature design from my sketch a few years before that.
The original foxy.
The refence sheet I used for designing the character
Another unfinished character design
Starting out artists should definitely try as many different things as possible, as it's hard to be 100% certain what you prefer drawing. I used to fear drawing characters and portraits simply because I lacked the skills. Fear should not be the deciding factor :)
My love for blue and purple was evident even back then :D
My new little dragon takes it to extreme xD
If you have any of the reference sources, please share them in the comments so others can see them as well.
Some of the portraits I have collected here: https://www.pinterest.com/kristinaglas/character-portraits-photo-ref/ and you can try cropping a specific image and try image search.
Good luck!
