Here's the finished version of my Alien piece. I altered a few of the shadows since the last pass and obviously added color. I'm fairly pleased with how this turned out. 

(Click the thumbnail for bigger version!)

I recently picked up one of my all-time favorite movies, Alien, on Blu-Ray. Watching it again inspired me to start a piece based on what, to me, is the scariest scene in the movie: the death of Lambert. There's just something about the way she just stands there, paralyzed with fear, while the alien approaches slowly, like he has all the time in the world.. It still gives me goose bumps.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity to show a little bit of my process, which is really pretty typical for any artist. It begins with a fairly rough sketch. I don't usually thumbnail (starting with very small loose sketches) per say, because working digitally makes size a little irrelevant. I do tend to work layer to layer though, dropping a rough sketch on one layer and then lowering the opacity and doing the next sketch on a new layer. I can build up 10 to 12 layers just redrawing and refining an idea.

That sketch is followed by some tightening, adding important details. I don't worry about getting everything right on this pass, sometimes all I need is to create some landmarks that inform the next go-through. In this case, I was mainly fleshing out the alien's anatomy a bit, as well as Lambert's costume. Don't even ask me why her hands are three feet long in this one.

This is the "ink" phase, though as I work all digitally, there's no actual ink, just another, tighter pass - adding detail as well as background.

Next I added solid blacks, because I wanted this piece to rely heavily on shadow. One lesson I learned long ago was not to be afraid to draw something the way I wanted it, and then lose parts of that drawing in shadow if the drawing required it. 

I've still got work to do on this one. There are some things I'm just noticing now that I want to alter, plus I'll add color. I save all of that for another post.

Everything drawn on the Wacom Cintiq in either Sketchbook pro or Photoshop CS5.