Today, I little insight to my art process. Recently, I worked out new pieces in my sketchbook. Starting with small thumbnails, I end up with a decently composited sketch:

rough sketch for Conjurers promotional art — Rough pencil sketch, 8 x 11 Moleskine notebook.

I scan these sketches in with my phone. Quick and easy. The sketch is only a loose guideline for the final piece so I don't need a high quality scan. Once I place the sketch into my Photoshop document, I can further tweak the different elements till I get a pleasing layout.

Once I'm relatively happy with the layout, I start inking. However, inking directly in such a large file can be annoyingly laggy. I select specific areas, create a new document and work on the inks there before dragging it back in to the original piece.

Inking process — Inking the tree separately from the rest of the drawing.

Above is a screenshot of the tree section. A lot of little detail here, so working in a separate, smaller file makes things a lot easier. You have to pay attention to line thickness. Making it too thin here will wash it out when it gets dragged back into the original.

Beginnings of final inks — Compositing the puzzle pieces.

In the image above, I've pieced together the main character inks and that weird carriage. Some background characters are still in the pencil stages as I haven't committed to the final layout or whether or not they will be included.

I've got a long way to go before I finish the inks. Then onto colors. I'll post that process down the road. The light at the end of the tunnel is that I will probably use this piece for both a convention banner and bookmarks.