lastly I added in the smoke cloud and its shadow, the fact that its grey helps cool the piece down and kind of pushes the eye toward the shiny parts, also it being a foreground element creates a sense of depth! smoke and particles are great way to do that :)
next I painted in the lightning and skin details, nothing special just some shinies on colour dodge. then I copied that layer and blurred it slightly and added some reddish orange with a soft brush to some parts for that extra warm glow
- in this case thats yellow. I also recommend trying to get the skin tone on low opacity into the hair and clothes, otherwise it gets sort of boxed in and the contrast that creates is too high for my liking
small corrections on a layer below the lineart followed by the first render layer which goes above the lineart. I do almost all of my rendering with these two brushes from a huge set I found online (link in carrd) and lasso fill on low opacity!
when colouring I start by filling the whole thing in with the skin tone, then I block the other colours in with a soft or fuzzy or hue jitter brush, this helps create middle tones (again, saves me the trouble of hand picking them) then I hit everything with an overlay layer
