I just finished a piece of artwork I've been working on for a few days: the Inkling from Splatoon, using the Inkling amiibo as a reference. You can find the finished piece in the Finished Artwork page, and a breakdown of the process of creating it, from the initial sketch, the line art, coloring and shading, to the finished piece, in the Work-In-Progress page.
This was the first time I've sat down to draw something in a really long time, and while it took me a bit to get my bearings, I have to say it felt really good, and I'm looking forward to drawing more.
The line art in particular was a learning process. I've never been very confident in my line art, and it showed in my first attempt. I decided I was going to teach myself to be more confident, so scrapped my first attempt and forced myself to start drawing quick, flowing lines. At first, I had to undo and re-draw every line a bunch of times until I got them right, but by the time I was done, I was doing that a lot less. Most of the lines in the legs and shoes, in particlar, were done in one or two tries. I feel like I've grown a lot as an artist just over the course of making this one drawing.
It's funny, because I've been away from creating art for so long that I was certain that my skills had atrophied, and it was going to be a long slog to get back up to the level of the work I was doing 10-15 years ago when I was at the top of my game and doing this stuff every day. I think that fear was a big part of what kept me away from it for so long. In a lot of ways, though, this picture is an improvement over some of what I was doing back then; certainly I've never done line art this clean. That feels pretty amazing. Not that I don't still have room to improve, because I absolutely do, but now I'm looking forward to working towards that instead of dreading it.