Inspiration pictures. The first is Maze by James Jean, the 2nd two are metal work pieces I found on Pinterest:

 

My initial sketch (after a couple of small thumbnails to decide on composition):

The iPad was brilliant because I thought I'd drawn the girl too big but it was too much bother to redraw her smaller! But with iPad, I put her in her own layer and resized her separately. I also decided that I wanted the metal flower to have really sharp edges to further contrast with the girl and nature:

 

Which resulted in this - using different mediums helped me contrast the metal flower and "tree" even more with the girl...

 

I should maybe stop here because I think the photo above actually looks pretty neat. But - sometimes photos look better than the real thing! I did this on cardstock and it just looked sad and empty at this stage, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with the background.

So... I pulled it back into iPad to play around with the idea of wavy lines (I'm sure inspired both by Jessie's background and the comic-y type background in some of James Jean's art):

which I think is fun and I should play more with for a future piece, but I really wanted to actually keep the work on paper (not just iPad) so I pulled out some copic markers and ended up with this:

Which... in this case I think looks better in person than the photo, probably because of all the different textures - gouache, modeling paste, colored pencil, copic markers, and a little bit of metallic rust acrylic paint.

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Thank you SOO much for this class! For one, I'm struggling like crazy because I feel like I don't draw well enough to come up with my own drawings and so just keep drawing other people's pictures rather than coming up with my own. You helped me let my guard down and also realize I didn't need super complicated reference photos to draw from.

And ALSO because I bought the latest iPad months ago specifically for Apple Pencil, but I was so overwhelmed at learning yet one more thing for art/drawing that I never drew on it until this class. The way you use it in your process makes so much sense and I think maybe takes a little more pressure off my drawing (will have to see with more pictures!).