Remus and Tonks-- From Start to Finish

I guess this title is kind of misleading... I'd meant to make this a sort of "Evolution of a Drawing" type of thing, showing how I work from the beginning stages of a piece to the very end. But this particular drawing was different in that I didn't start from a thumbnail sketch-- which I do 99% of the time. But I figured I'd start with this drawing of Remus and Tonks from the Harry Potter series because I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it.

(Speaking of feedback, I'm so grateful for it. I'm never sure whether or not someone will like what I do-- even if it's just a sketch done for fun-- and when I do get feedback it's awesome! I really do appreciate each and every comment.)

Now then, as I said above, 99% of the time when I begin a piece I start with a thumbnail. Normally I'll do a page worth of thumbnail sketches-- just little scribbles of drawings where I pour my ideas onto a page once I think of the subject matter I want to tackle. In this case, though, I started on a rough sketch right away rather than begin from a thumb. I drew it up on regular ol' 8.5" x 11" typing paper after I'd finished reading the final book in the Harry Potter series and was aggravated as hell that my two favorite characters were basically treated like crap.

I drew a rough sketch in blue pencil, then went straight over my rough sketch with a mechanical pencil. The result (after scanning and some level adjusting in Photoshop) is below:



Next I took it into Photoshop and went to work on the colors. This was actually my very first time coloring in this particular style, so I guess you could say that I used Remus and Tonks as guinea pigs... But the result was decent enough:



So... there you go! Not much of what I'd originally wanted to do with this post, but next time should hopefully prove to be much more interesting... or something. At least the lineart for this piece is finally revealed, haha.