I decided I'd try making my twitch stream more interactive my posting progress in a thread here. I just wanted to share some process images and approaches for creating characters 
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I'll be streaming over at https://www.twitch.tv/artstoff
Here's the start from the first stream:
Due to the holidays I haven't been able to stream but I have been updating.
The clothing is all rough here. I create it by masking off areas of the body and extracting from it. From there I quickly push and pull the shape into a very general form. For parts like the skirt a good thing to do is put in a cylinder and get it to generally match the silhouette. The skirt can then be extracted from that.
At this stage I also kept the body pretty rough. The proportions are still subject to change after blocking in the clothing and I don't want to waste time refining anything until I'm happy how everything feels as a unit.
Another side note is that I poly-painted the eyes. Knowing the size and position of the Iris's has a huge impact on the face and really helps me structure the eye sockets and cheekbones.
