Firestorm cover

This is a Brightest Day cover.  It went through a few steps, and I took scans as I went, so I figured I'd post them here. 

This is my underdrawing.  I don't bother putting much detail into them anymore.  I found I have to do all the work again with paint, so why do it twice? 

 Then I did a tonal wash with burnt sienna, and started blocking in colors.  I had no idea where I was going with the picture, but I don't really have time to be doing prelims, or color roughs or whatever.  I had to go pick up the kids from school, so this is where it stopped for now. 

 I had planned on scanning after each session so I could do a step by step, but this is the end of the next session.  I was done.  It really didn't take very long.  It's a single figure, and I'm getting more comfortable with my color mixing, so I'm not losing as much time with the unpredictability of the paint.  I've been greying all my colors with their compliments, but I've found lately that using black and white is a more effective solution in some situations.  Red dulls to brown the same way with green or black.  No difference for me, except for a more predictable result.  And blue can darken to a bit of a purple, or a bit of an orange, or straight black, all with a different, but useable effect.  So anyway, point being...I'm finding that using compliments gets great results, and I can really make use of the warm to cool effects of mixing that way, but in some cases (like greying yellow) I need to be creative.  Black and yellow make green, but so does it's compliment.  If I want to grey it, I need to step from yellow, to ochre, to raw sienna, and then I can introduce black.  Unless I want the green.....

 There was a mixup, and I forgot that this cover had to be done with a white background for Icon cover month, so I had to resort to photoshop, and select out the background, blur the edges, and throw in an orange halo for effect, and to reduce the look of the edges.  It ended up being much more designy than I had intended, but I kind of like it this way.