Triceratops on a Tricycle

Did y'all know Triceratops invented tricycles? Tricycles were invented because Triceratops had difficulty balancing on two wheels. It's true dont even bother looking it up. I present to you photographic evidence of the first Tricycle.
(sketch and process below)
Just a pretty straightforward ink sketch here. Mostly using microns and a marker for spot blacks. There is some minor editing in photoshop. Just adjustment for darker blacks and less noise. I typically dont bother to scan in sketches. I'll just take a picture from my phone and upload it to dropbox. I try to keep the lighting and slight coloring of the photo about the same to keep it looking like a colored sketch rather than a full digital drawing. As you can see, the paper here is a bit warm and that will seep through all the colors I put into the piece.

This is where I lay down the flat colors. I tried to use ones I think will be "fun." As you can see, there are no true whites here, the whites are all sort of a warm cream which comes from the paper it was drawn on. The background is a pretty simple gradient. Unless I want a piece to come off obnoxiously loud, I'll try to keep the background a little desaturated. A lot of social media sites will also compress colors pretty poorly and saturated colors almost always come off pretty bad

The shadows are pretty simple. Just a hard edge desaturated purple on a multiply layer. I added the shadow on the ground so the character doesnt look like theyre floating too much. I also try to keep the shadows away from the rendering inks I put down on his pants or on the red of the trike. Overlaying shadows with rendered inks can sometimes muddy the two.

You'll have to scroll back up for when I added the highlights since that was the final step, but its pretty simple. I bring up a new layer and set it to screen or hard light and then choose accompanying colors I think will look good. I try not to overdo it and stick to hard edges or reflective surfaces. When it comes to pieces like this, its probably better to not do too much than over render and make it look overdone.