I always rough out my compositions for my images first so I can get a feeling of the final image in my mind before starting any work on the piece. So here in Fig.01, I did my composition study, and then moved on to rendering the girl in the pencil sketch to achieve the 3D form of the figure. I continue to achieve a sense of the pose and structure of the figure, with both lines and shade, until I am ready to scan it in and work digitally.

Note: For this illustration I worked very expressively and rough. I worked very much like a traditional painting as I painted over most of my line and shade work further on in the process.

So I scanned in the pencil shaded sketch at 300 dpi in grayscale, go to image>adjustments>levels and play around with the settings to clean up the sketch a bit, and finally I can start rendering the figure in Photoshop (Fig.02).

This stage was very important for this piece, as it pretty much decides the whole light source of it. I made sure I suggested the muscles, bones with tones. Also, I wanted to have enough contrast in the figure, lights, mediums, and darks. When I’m done all this, I made a bigger file and canvas, pasted this figure onto it and started to bring in the other elements in pretty much black and white still (Fig.04).

I did the graffiti design here also and worked out every other element. The textures in the edges are all texture brushes effects; you can download these brushes from different artist’s blogs or websites, such as the texture brushes Linda Bergkvist (http://www.furiae.com/) Goro Fujita (http://www.area-56.de/) . But some of the brushes I actually used in the piece was created by myself. Look up texture brushes in a search engine for some fast links. So after all the black and white version of your illustration is done. Its time to move on to the colour!