So, I took the advice of doing small sketches to get myself out of this supposed art block.

Tried two new things here!
1. The obvious one - The toony drawing style. A long-standing critique was that my characters were a bit rigid and stiff - then always referred to cartoon reference pose sites. Before I was going for realism (hah hah hah), so it wouldn't be so useful. I still don't want to look at other's styles so I just built my own here.

2. The less obvious one - Pushing the pencil harder on the page. This results in a massive clarity boost. What you see is the original sketch - what I usually do with sketches and also pencil lineart is turn the contrast up (We're talking +60% to 80% for pencil lineart) .. which results in a loss of lineart quality. Here however, I've really put the pencil into the lines I want, meaning.. well, I have the lines I want. Without alterations.