Commission Work : The Night is Watching

This is a commission I did last year. I was asked to create an illustration of my client's character from the game she's playing :)

Personality:

She has a kind heart that truly wants to do good, but her methods are frowned upon, dangerous, and illegal.
A Robin Hood sort of character. She gets in trouble with the law, but she uses her “evil” actions to protect the poor and the weak.
Since it seems you’ve seen Scarlet Heart Ryeo, consider Wang So. My character and Wang So have very, very similar personalities. She is very intense. People fear her. She’s dangerous and always seems unfriendly, but she has a sincere desire to do good despite her willingness to attack people and use extreme measures. She thinks other people aren’t up to her standards, and she will be very harsh and rude to them. To her friends, she has a cold personality but would protect and make sacrifices for them.
She stays in the shadows and crawls along rooftops to find a position to shoot her targets and run before getting caught.

(1) Sketch
Sketch stage is a draft guidelines for your painting. From personal experience, I can say don't judge a painting by it's sketch because I've experience that sometime my sketch looks better then the final result and sometimes my sketch looks crap than the final painting. hahahahaha

(2) I trace my sketch to create a silhouette of the character, I did it to use for my clipping mask when adding further details

(3) I started building up the values, but decided to focus on the face part, so the other parts were super draft

(4) I added a gradient map on the character. I mention how I did the settings here on "How to create BnW to Color"

(5) And then I added colors with soft light layer. I also painted the background simultaneously, but was not able to save a step bu step for the bg layers