Illustration: Read Across the Universe

It's Children's Book Week here in Australia, and the 2013 theme is Read Across the Universe so I created a colouring page specially for it. I liked the result and decided that it would make a fun portfolio piece, so I coloured it up into a full illustration:

You can grab the colouring page from the colouring page section of my website (which will also take you to a number of other colouring pages) or by clicking on the thumbnail below

As usual, I am providing high-quality colouring pages for private home or school use. Have lots of fun with them, but please don't use them commercially or distribute them without my logo and web address on. =)

Here's a progress animation of the creation of this piece: 

To start with I created some rough pose references in Manga Studio 5. I've just started using this programme and the 3D drawing references are very handy, especially when it means I don't have to try and recreate weightlessness while photographing a live model. 

Once I had my models roughly where I wanted, I drew right on top of them until I have a very rough sketch. 

I took this rough sketch into Photoshop, and refined it a bit before printing it out. 

Using my refined sketch as a guide I drew a tight pencil layout using pencil on layout paper.

I scanned this in and inked it digitally using photoshop. 

And then I coloured it, first laying down flat colours and then adding shading and colouring the linework. 

Adobe Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3