Saiga new look

Hello, viewer!
I struggled for a long time to finish this personal concept. For half a year, I kept opening this almost-complete illustration and then closing it again. Not because I was lazy or blocked, no.
I felt ashamed for exploring and inventing my own style with the help of AI tools. As if I, an artist who has been drawing all my conscious life, had no right to make that life easier!
But that’s not true at all. Here I decided to share my process of creating a new character design for a personal project inspired by Slavic fairy tales.

“Saiga,” that’s the name of the heroine, began a long time ago — with simple references, with the image of a little sorceress in a magical hat. With the revival of Bilibin’s popularity, I revisited the concept and made a quick sketch, then took it into MidJourney. Feeding in my sketch, I iterated until I arrived at a look that satisfied me. MidJourney helped me capture the spirit of the heroine I wanted to paint.

Then I began sampling my old works into MidJourney to get silhouettes and color solutions, and from there I painted everything by hand. Sometimes I would generate a very specific reference - a hand, a skull, a color palette - to emphasize details and carve out my own unique style. After refining the concept, all that remained was honing the “technical” rendering skills - which, in my view, will soon fade into the past, leaving us artists with the most exciting part: generating the idea itself.

What do you think? Is this cheating, or simply the toolkit of our new reality?
And by the way - how do you like Saiga?