WoT vignette tutorial--?

recently a good buddy of mine, jeremy saliba, and i were graciously asked by the illuminator's guild to do a Q & A session over at dragonmount regarding our fan art of the series--i think the Q & A session will be held in the forums section, under the illuminator's guild or the artist's chapter house threads, if anyone is interested in checking it out--anywho, a small tutorial was suggested, so here it goes--well, tutorial is a bit misleading, because it implies that i actually know what i'm doing--i'll just call it a step by step process that i use to complete a piece like this--

first, i start out with a plain ol' line drawing, digitally sketched using a wacom tablet in photoshop--

next, i'll insert the paper texture background to give me some sort of value to work from instead of just the white background--mostly because it makes it look all fancy-like--

then i'll start laying in basic color with a rough sense of light and shadow--

i'll start to detail things out after that--dents and scratches in the armor, etc--

once i'm at the stage where i'm done with all the details (or i'm too lazy to add any more), i'll go in and pick out some highlights and try to fix areas i might have missed before--


finally, add in the border details and i'm done--generally speaking, these usually take anywhere from 4 hours and up, depending on how complicated the character is--