Groudon! Welcome back to art!

Hello steemit folks! I'm happy to be part of the community!

Now that I have some downtime I decided to get back into drawing and painting. It's something I've always done as a child, through high school but life happened and I sort of stopped! In fact my last painting was in 2006! I will post that one at a different time but here's how I started and what I ended up with!

The Sketch:

I'm extremely picky when it comes to making sure that proportions are right things look like they should based off the reference that I used. The initial sketch took me around 7 hours!!

I've always liked oldschool japanese prints where you see kanji on the side somewhere so that's what I did with it's name.

Inking:
I used Micron pens to ink my final sketch and I was terrified of it at first! With pencil you can always erase but ink...it's one shot! :O

Coloring:
To achieve the right colors I used Sakura Koi watercolor brush markers and Prismacolor Watercolor pencils. Since these are both water based it was a good way for me to blend colors. I know this might not be the "intended" way to use it but hey it's art! Anything is fair game! Be careful thought that if you layer too many colored pencils and then go over it with a brush marker it creates this almost oil paint like substance. Coloring took me around 6 hours because again I felt like I only had one shot to get it right and I didn't tackle it all at once!

The Finished product:

I love how it turned out at the end. When I colored his body (the grey) I put way too many layers of grey and everything started to get way darker than I wanted it to be. Luckily I was able to fix it by blending a bit more and just choosing to go one shade darker with all the grey's. Overall thought I'm very happy for it to be my first project back and I can't wait to show you all the next project that I'm currently working on.