Why not try...?

I have been using Poser and other 3d programs to make pictures on which to base illustrations for my Razorback story. Poser 10 includes an improved "sketch style" renderer which results in some of these reference pictures looking good enough to use as they are, to the extent where I wonder why I'm basing drawings on them.
Of course, this is what happened last time. When I first bought Poser (it was on version 5 at the time) I was fully intending to base drawn illustrations on the rendered pictures, but one look at the renders convinced me to try and do all the pictures digitally. Once that decision had been made, however, I ran into all sorts of problems. Mainly, the very simple images worked fine, but the more ambitious, complex ones slowed my computer down to a crawl, leading to hours of frustration. The "toon shading" feature in Poser was horribly inconsistent, the program occasionally malfunctioned, losing the pictures I'd been working on, and the models that I was using were mostly other people's, and were very recognisable as such. In the end the digital image route led to a dead end.