Here’s a break­down of that last illus­tra­tion I posted!

I began this image by lay­ing down the basic out­lines with a medium sized brush. 

I then added the black back­ground, and began adding more detail with a smaller brush. 

At this point, I started draw­ing the hair in over the black, using white. I also started using a very tiny brush, and put in even more detailed black lines. I am always tempted to leave my line work too clean, which is some­thing I’m try­ing to get over. I miss some of the messy, scrib­bly qual­i­ties of my early work, so I’m try­ing to recap­ture that.

Splat­ter gets added next, in both white and black. I also put in some heavy out­lines with a thick brush.
I’m try­ing to get a lot of vari­a­tion in my line weight lately, to try and rely on my shad­ing & col­or­ing less. 

I also added the hand let­tered text, which went through sev­eral iter­a­tions of cur­sive and script fonts until I just hand drew it in my usual serif.

Rough color gets added.
I hate this step every time because the image instantly loses much of it’s def­i­n­i­tion and it takes work to get it back. 

Rough shad­ing.
I’m exper­i­ment­ing a lit­tle with the lines com­ing off of the shad­ing. I keep waf­fling over whether I like it.

Rough high­lights.
I wanted the light­ing to be really dra­matic, so I chose a really high con­trast palate. 

Ini­tial tex­tures.
This tex­ture is put on in spe­cific spots that appear to really need it, which dif­fers from the next step because it’s very inten­tional where the tex­ture goes. 

Rounded cor­ners, color tweaks & tex­tures.
The image wasn’t quite warm enough for me, so I adjusted it a bit.
then I started throw­ing tex­ture on at ran­dom.
I often find that if I think about it too much, I never get any­thing I like.
This though, I am happy with. 

& that’s it!