I recently had a meeting with an agency and they were asking me to show the various steps of an image, from sketch to finished. This is how I broke it down.
This is the first stage when I do the rough pencils.
For this image I sketched Wolvie on a piece of paper and scanned it in and did a rough of the background directly on Photoshop.
Neatened up the sketch, made some corrections and here's the inks ready for coloring.
Here I started applying flat colors. Colors might change a lot during the process so doesn't really matter at this stage which ones I'm putting down.
Also got rid of the speedlines for now (still kept the hidden layer in case I wanted to add them later) 'cause I thought I wanted this scene to be rainy and thought keeping them would just look messy with the rain.
Here I started adding textures (buildings, clouds), shadows and highlights. Also decided I was going to add the moon so the character would pop up.
Here I added more highlights and glows on the neon signs.
At this stage I thought I wanted to change the whole mood of the image so I added a color layer to change the overall colors.
Here's the final image. I added the rain, rain splashes on the character and buildings/signs and tried to make everything look wet, from to his uniform, skin, etc.
I also did a variation, just for fun, just applying some filters and changing the hues/saturation.
