Blue Ninja Process

I thought I'd do this rather small walkthrough of my blogger header or whatever it's called. This is my logo for... whatever. Okay, here we go.
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Step 1.  I think of an image I'd like to get on paper. I usually do about three sketches to limit myself to the last pose I think of. Because if not, I'd go on forever and not even get to finish the piece.

Step 2.  Once I find a sketch I like, I draw the guidlines on paper with a 2H pencil. At this point, you can be messy as you want. These lines will be drawn over any way.

Step 3.  After the guides are done, I go over it with a 4H pencil or .5 mechanical pencil trying to get the line weight going. Of course this is optional since we're going to digitally ink the piece anyway. But I find that it gives me a better guide of how thick I'll make the lines in photoshop.

Step 4. The piece is digitally inked using the pen tool in photoshop. I actually trace over the lines and then fill them in to give it that hand inked look with varying line weight. It takes long but it looks good

Step 5. I do the flats making sure that there's no white showing up behind the lines. I won't go much into that, but I recommend Mark Sweeney's flats tutorial
Step 6. The next step is the actual shading. I decided to do cell shading since the ninja is somewhat cartoony (and also because it was late at night and I was being a bit lazy). This is pretty self explanatory

Step 7. Okay. Here I made the highlights using the gradient tool on overlay and a lighter color. I chose a green for some reason. After that, I chose some places where the back lighting would be and used the same gradient tool with  a different color on hard light mode and voilá

Oh yeah... the glowing eyes were set to screen with a soft edged brush at 20-30 opacity

Cool my first tutorial walkthrough

Happy sketching!