From Start to Finish: Gambit

Me completing a picture from start to finish is definitely a rare occasion. And to mark this once in a blue moon, only once in a lifetime thing, I've decided to post my process in how I came about to the final product. Keep in mind that I've learned all of this stuff on my own, so I know that I probably do everything posted here the absolute wrong way, or that there are better more efficient ways of going about how I came to the final...but you live and you learn. And if some people who are reading could give me some pointers and useful steps...please believe that it would be greatly appreciated.

So I started out with a rough sketch:
No fancy art pencils here...I've always used regular #2 pencils. This was done with a #2 bic pencil on 8.5"x11" paper. I have a terrible habit of drawing things too big for the paper, and I know I can fix this by using actual comic board or A3/A4 sized paper...but unfortunately, I don't have any. And I don't have a scanner that can accommodate paper of that size. So, the foot and the card at the bottom are too close to the end of the paper...which usually means problems.

The last post I posted a WIP (work in progress) inking of this pic. No special pens used here either. I normall have art Staedtler pens, but this time, microball pens. They vary in size, so I used a heavy thick one for the outline of Gambit, the medium sized one for the outlines of major shapes and parts, and the fine tipped one for details. And here's how that turned out:
Unfortunately due to the scan, part of his fingers got cut off...so I rescanned it and tried to get as much of the pic scanned as possible. This was to be my first beginning to end coloring job in Photoshop, but I decided to stick to what I know and used GIMP. My next one will definitely be Photoshop though. I did a new process that I've seen alot of people do, which is lay down the flat colors first without any shading. This made things go by much easier and much quicker, even though that part is sooooo boring. I love shading, and this felt like a chore...but it had to get done:
Then when the flats were done...now it was time for me to have a ball and get to shading and adding highlights and effects and stuff. Also, I had to flesh out the energy effect for the lower card and add some to his foot which I couldn't do on traditional paper. I also added a motion blur effect to the cards here as well by using the magic lasso tool in GIMP. I didn't like the weird ghosting looking outline it left around that, so I blurred it later on with the blur/sharpen tool to fix it:Oh snap!! We're rolling now. But this would look a million times better with a background. And since I'm really not a fan of drawing backgrounds directly onto the picture, I drew it on another page. I already had a basic idea of what I wanted to do, so it let me take some liberties with the background and not make it as detailed as this part. So we wound up with this, a Sentinel from the X-Men comics:Yep...pretty plain and basic huh. Actually, I'm not happy with this part at all...but it doesn't really matter because I knew that you wouldn't be able to see most of it anyways. So here we go again, with the boring flat colors...yay...(end sarcasm):Okay, I knew that this was going to be the background, so I had to flesh this out a little. I shaded it, and added textures to it because I wanted him to look metallic...because...well, he is. Then I added some particle effects to his hand, some glow reflection stuff, some sky, clouds, stars and a moon and came up with this:Its not all that detailed, and there's ALOT that I hate about this, but its cool, cause you won't see much of it anyways. So, I flattened this out to .png file as well as the other Gambit part, and then made the Sentinel the background, and posted Gambit on top. I desaturated the hell out of the colors for both pieces, blurred the background, added some minor details here and there...and came up with the final product:Cool stuff huh? Yeah...its okay...and doing this was definitely a learning experience. Now I just have to get to inking all of these 'in progress' sketches...and maybe get to that Gladiator one...

So much to do...so little time.