Advent Calendar: Behind the Scenes Special!

I thought it would be fun to show you how one of these drawings comes together. Remember that if you click on the images, you can see them at 700x510.

I start by sketching out the scene lightly in pencil (darkened here to make it show up).

Then I draw over the pencil with a fineliner -- this is about half-done.
Here I've finished drawing the ink lines and rubbed out the pencil marks.

Next I fill in the first layer of coloured pencil, the main blocks of colour.

The shading and details are done with more pressure, so the colours start to darken.

Finally, I edit the image in Photoshop, cropping the image, making the colours richer and tweaking some fiddly details.

Spot the Difference! In this picture, a mistake with the Tyrannosaurus' leg needed erasing; the Torosaurus' markings were cut and pasted from the 18/12/09 drawing of him so they'd be identical; a bit of brown leg that encroached on the yellow glow was snipped out; and I added some shading to the haybale.

The development would probably be much easier to see if I posted an animated .gif, but I don't know how to make those, so I hope this post explains it well enough.