January step by step (Patreon)

Photo reference! Somewhere between Haast and Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand.

Sketch

Lines

My favourite commercial Clip Studio Brushes have a bunch of really cool watercolour brushes that I very rarely use because they lay down colour very lightly (much like real watercolour, I guess?) and so the final colour scheme of a picture is always a bit of a surprise. Having the final colour scheme be a surprise is a bit dangerous for a webcomic, where I want a consistent colour scheme at least in the one scene, which is why I don't use these brushes very often.

But colour consistency doesn't matter for a wallpaper so I decided to play around with them. I mostly used the Wash Flat Bristle, Dodger Waters and Flat Diluted.

Lots of laying down colours on top each other, mostly all on one layer.

I duplicated the colouring layer, which essentially duplicated the amount of 'paint' on the screen, and then merged the two layers together, which made the colours darker/more vibrant.

Then more layering on colours. I honestly don't know what I'm doing, but it's fun having no real idea how a colour scheme will turn out :)

I didn't want Sunati and Austen to blend into the background too much so I started with dark colours for them and laid on lighter colours. This may not have been a good idea?

More lighter colours on Sunati and Austen, in the hope of making them stand out from the background but also blend in??? Drew a rough white outline over the colours but under the lineart, to give it a vague watercolour feel.

Final adjustments. Add some purple over the background with an overlay layer. Made everything bluer with a colour adjustment layer, increased the contrast with a levels layer. I'm not 100% happy with how this turned out, but I definitely want to play around with these brushes more :)