A drawing from sketch to art

Hi Chaps,

I've just done a set of black and white samples of various characters aimed at early reader/chapter books.
You can see five of them on my website, the first five in the block of black and white pictures.
But here, I thought I'd post the development of one picture from first idea sketch in my sketch pad, to rough, scanned into photoshop, to finished drawing, so you can have a look.
I'll talk through the little brother stamping onto puddles.
First, is this idea sketch I did with real pencil in my real life sketch pad, while watching tv.
I do mostly sketch straight in photoshop, and just do all the stages there, but this time I just happened to be doing it on my sketch pad.

This one wasn't quite right, and the idea crystallised a bit in my head, and I was able to come up with this.

I do find that if I get a good image in my mind it's sort of a matter of 'copying' it out of my head onto paper.
I then reworked the drawing of the head a bit, and did this separate sketch of the head.

I then scanned it all in and stuck the second sketch and the head together in photoshop, like so

and then knocked them down to 40% opacity, a bit like putting it on a lightbox and putting a new sheet of paper over it, and drew the final 'inked' image.

And there we are.
Hope that's interesting and maybe a bit informative too :)

New Profile Image

I've updated my profile image, there it is to the right.

The previous version was an old bit of work that I just used so I could get my blog set up quick.

But now I've finally got round to doing a special version of it especially for my blog, more in keeping with my work nowadays.

So, there you go :)