December step by step (Patreon)

Initial sketch. I struggle to draw people both cuddling and sitting, so thought I'd push myself a bit.

Inking a bit of the drawing a time, by doing a more detailed sketch of the area I'm inking, then inking it. I kept the very messy undersketch at about 20% opacity while doing this, but hid it for this process image so you can see that my 'more detailed' sketch isn't really very detailed.

Finished lines. I'm not entirely sure the anatomy works, and it's not as 'snuggly' as the initial sketch (in that they're not as squished together as I'd wanted) but at least Sunati now looks taller than Austen so that's something :)

Roughing out some colours. My aim was to do something that felt warm but had a lot of blue. At this point I had my computer screen on night mode, so it was emitting reddish light, and so the colours looked very different to me than they do now. Whoops!

I used CPS's auto-colour to have some colours for Austen and Sunati, just to keep their presence visually on the screen, while I worked on the background.

Colours progress. 

And colours progress. For Sunati and Austen, each area of colour (eg. hair, scarf, pants, skin, book cover etc.) had a base layer, and then I clipped new layers to this base layer to add shading on top. I didn't do this for the background - I just painted wherever, with no separation between areas of colours and you can see the colours spill over into each other a lot more. I think having slightly neater colouring for the focal point of the picture works well :)

Added some final details, and used overlay layers and adjustment layers to get the colours to look the way I wanted (please keep in mind that my computer screen is still set to night mode.)

Realized that I had night mode on!!! Turned night more off and added a few more adjustment layers to get the colours roughly the way I was seeing them on the night mode screen. And done!