[Art Draft] One Piece - "Screw Off" (Lucci, Paulie) -- HALP?! Any improvement? Crit please! D=

So, I've got an art-related question. Does anyone remember this drawing of Lucci and hungover Paulie? Well, I liked the idea a lot, but the execution was not that great. I've actually been drawing again this week, thanks in large part to having to get off my ass and try to kick-start ff_100 again.

Well, I'm trying to redraw the idea. Except, you know. Better. The problem is, I don't know if the new version is better than the old one. Can you guys help me out here?



( In-progress artses under cut )

I asked yaznall when I was home last night and he said that he liked the sketchiness and general feel of the old version better, and I think I agree. I can always make this new one messier (yay, pencil tool!), but I'm not sure if it's worth it. There's also that hangup I have where I feel that I can only nail a given expression once. Did I make enough things better? I think I can recapture the grunge if I try, but I'm not sure that I made the second version better enough to be worth it.

Any thoughts?

Plus, if I abandon this second version I can go draw my new obsession, Kratos from Tales fo Symphonia. Or finish regann's ff_100 thank-you-for-entering art. Or draw some Seifer/Zell to lure bottle_of_shine out of whatever hole she fell in to (where are you?).

... I was going to cleverly add "*is lazy*" after the bit about dropping this makeover project but then I got into my list of OTHER stuff I need to be doing and realized that no, I'm not lazy. It's more along the lines of irretrievably crazy with a side of off-and-on criminal lethargy.

Recs: BACK FROM THE DEAD. Booyah.

So! I just finished my first rec post since various offline life-related things laid me low.

The theme for this post and the next couple is fandoms you know, fanworks you don't (lambspam, you should recognize the phrase =P). I tried to find works that seemed to have gotten less love than their quality and fandom merited, and do my part to pimp them out.

So, uh! There are 47 recs in this post. To see them, head on over to picks_n_paeans!