I'm doing this a little differently than usual: I'm posting the progress shots BEFORE the finished version. Because 1) I still haven't picked a title for the picture, as you may have guessed; 2) I want to wait a bit and see if I still have no major problems with the pic when I come back to it later; and 3) I'm wondering if showing the progress before the finished product will affect your viewing experience?

Step 1. It's that narrow image at the top left corner. I did several sketches for this one. This is the one I ended up using, although I did change it a lot as you can see. The other ones are even more dissimilar.

Step 2. Three perspective guides are used: vertical (green), horizontal X (blue), horizontal Y (pink). I put them on separate layers so I could turn them on or off as needed.

Step 3. Trying to come up with pose that's not so... stupid-looking. This is what I ended up with. This process took a LOT longer than you might think.

Step 4. Changing and refining the background sketch. Each color has its own layer.

Step 5. Quick colors. Merged all the sketch layers into one, made the lines all black, and reduced the opacity to something like 17%. If you read my journal, this is the WIP I was talking about. And yes, this is the "simple" coloring that I mentioned. I think the sketch just looked more complex than it really was because the lines were colored all differently.

Step 6 & 7. Detailing.

Step 8. Finally getting started on the character! Even with the new pose, she looked like she was missing something, so I gave her a bag.

Step 9. Finished version. More details, color/contrast adjustment. And if you look closely, you'll see that I changed the height/width ratio... I made the picture slightly taller by adding a little bit more space towards the top because I felt the character's head was too close to the vertical middle of the image.

A note on her hair: I normally don't use these orangey, saturated colors for blond hair, but that's exactly what this character's hair color is. It was really hard to get the hair right with all this crazy lighting stuff going on.