I usually start with a 3D model for reference to get the overall proportions and pose. Then I'll move over to photoshop and make a stick figure, adjust arm position and whatnot, then do the lines.
I don't do hairy line sketches anymore, I try to go straight to near final lines. I draw each line as quickly and smoothly as I can, and if I mess up I'll just undo and draw it again. Sometimes I undo, you know, 20 times in a row. But that's fine.
I end up with a bunch of disconnected lines, and that makes it easier to tweak things. If I notice her spine is crooked say, I can easily cut out her upper body and move it around without having to redraw too much. I also put some parts on separate layers. In this picture I notice that her rear arm is maybe a bit short or has some weird perspective on it, but her arms are on a separate layer so it's easy to fix.
If you look at the sketch vs final here: https://satinminions.com/img/thick-80.html https://satinminions.com/img/thick-80-color.html You can see that I changed the arms, hair, and clothes, and fixed some proportion/perspective problems on her hips and thighs. I always put clothes, face, and arms on separate layers because they can make a big difference to the tone of the image and often overlap everything, making it difficult to change if it's all one layer.
I merge all the line layers together when I start coloring. I used to keep them all separate but you end up navigating the layers too much to do cleanup. I'll experiment with colors on different layers, but once I know what I'm doing I'll merge them. On comics or animations where I already know what the palette is, it's definitely easier and faster to color all on one layer. Sometimes I'll keep clothing as layer to do transparency effects.
Shading is just a layer over top of everything. I'll try different colors and gradients, then scroll through the layer combine methods until it looks good.
For motion blur or depth of field, I'll flatten the whole image, copy and paste it as a new layer, apply various blurs, then use mask to reveal the unblurred image below in key areas.
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That about covers it. I should probably make a process/tutorial page since people ask about it a lot.
Wow! thanks for the detailed response. If you ever just screen capped you sketching an image and then maybe colouring it so that people could watch the process first hand that would probably be a satisfactory tutorial. ever thought about streaming your sketches? all the cool kids are doing it.
I'm glad your patreon is succeeding so much by the way, you deserve it!
The double posting thing isn't your fault, there's some weird stuff with the caching on the site that makes new comments not show up immediately. I need to AJAX-ify it.
A stream seems like it'd end up sad and lonely. I might record a timelapse.
