Strangling the Behemoth in Full Color

I've been tinkering with digital coloring, having enjoyed colorizing my Carvajal picture the other day. I had a pen-and-ink sketch of Keftu strangling the behemoth lying about, so, though it's really more of a doodle than a finished work of art, I decided to attempt coloring it.

Given what I started with, I think it came out rather well.

Here's the original line art:

The behemoth is based on several things: the estemmenosuchids of the Middle Permian, the Behemoth in Blake's illustrations to Job, these weird green dog/lion statuettes my Granny kept in her living room, and a vicious chihuahua named Paco who used to get into my backyard to terrorize my children. (Not that you wanted to know all that.)

I began by creating a layer of colored flats to provide the base color for the image.

Then came the fun part: adding tone and special effects. Here's the final image, sans line art:

I think it's pretty cool-looking like that, a bit like a Frazetta painting (if I do say so myself).

And now let's see that final image one more time:

This is only my second attempt at digital coloring, but I'm beginning to realize what I can do with it. It goes much faster than watercolor, and might turn out to be more marketable a skill in today's increasingly digitized blah blah blah. My next goal is to do a good line drawing with the express purpose of digital coloring.