Properly scanned Vax and tutorial

I'm so frigging happy with this. And with how well it scanned! It was just a breeze to scan and post-work, much easier than watercolour, even with all the practice I have. The background is the "Shire blue" watercolour I told you about earlier! 

Here's the rest of the tutorial. I feel so 2005 for doing a tutorial like this, haha. ;) 

9: Adding blue streaks to the hair (and some to the skin) after laying down the brown. 

10: Laying down a pale blue base layer for the clothes. It felt so wrong to dress Vax in baby blue. =D Putting down a green sheen to it, too. 

11: Adding a desaturated purple. I can not work without desaturated purples. They're the best for black. 

12: Putting down purples in the hair as well. I work in overall layers here, the way I would in watercolour, so I can see how the different areas affect each other. You often see coloured pencil artists work in tiny portions that they complete with all detail before moving on to the next portion; this works best when working from photo reference that you just have to match. 

13: I've put about everything down that needs to go down. Now I can take a look with fresh eyes to see what's missing. Apart from the skin, nothing is blended at this point. 

14. Some warmer brown tones in his hair are missing, for example. 

15. BLENDING! I use two different ways to blend: For darker colours that are allowed to go even richer and darker, I use a blending pencil (here, the burnisher from Derwent, which does the job best, I find). For lighter areas - like the skin and the lighter portions of his hair - I use a white or pale cream coloured pencil, which results in great smoothness and doesn't dull the colours. 

16. Blending the feathers was so much fun. It's amazing to see that stuff suddenly pop to life. I followed my colour lines while blending, and left some toothier bits standing. 

Final touchups! 

17: Hair smoothing. 

18: Feather detail. 

19: Almost done, with a simple watercolour wash in the background. Coloured pencil paper is too thin for watercolour, so the paper cockled rather badly. I had to moisten the back and flatten it between heavy books before scanning. (I also forgot I no longer have a printer with waterproof ink, so the Procreate lines bled a bit on the outlines.) 

20: I'm still finding my way around the brightness and saturation of coloured pencils, and the feathers especially felt too colourful for Vax. So I went for the complementary colour of blue/green - a dull orange - to subtly tone them down.