Step 1: Thumbnails, references and sketches
Trying to trace back to the origin of some of my illustrations is difficult. I really can't recall where the seed for this one came from: movies, television, other blogs (of which there are countless that I check on regularly for inspiration)... I am pretty sure the art of Arthur Rackham and Alan Lee was on my mind at the time - particularly the idea of lots of overlapping foliage hiding some fae folk in their natural habitat. When I have an image percolating in my mind I'll start with a rough thumbnail in my sketch book to see whether it is something pursuing. In this case, the thumbnail came out very quickly and seemed faithful to my mind's eye. The next step was to hunt down some references for the water nymphs. Google is very useful (search 'naked female back' for example), as is a growing collection of reference photos I have accumulated throughout the years. I usually like to then sketch something based on the reference and then put the reference away and work from my sketch from there on. That way I resist the urge to be too slavish to the original reference.
Steps 2 and 3: pencils and inks
Once I have a decent number of references and sketches I commit to the pencil stage. I was working on large arches hot-pressed paper for this one (roughly poster size) and that allowed me to indulge some detailed line work. I decided to approach this illustration with a stronger emphasis on the line work and so avoided adding too much tonal work at the pencil stage. Once the pencils were done I moved on to the ink stage. Inking brings a crispness to the line-work but it also squashes a little of the natural charm of the pencil lines. I noticed that in the face of the reclining nymph in the foreground in particular (perhaps I will skip the ink stage on my next illo). I decided to push the contrast by inking large shadow areas behind the background trees and to the left and right of the foreground. This was a scary stage because it had the potential to over-power the illustration and I wouldn't really know if it was a mistake until I had the bulk of the colours down.
Step 4: Underpainting
Once the inks had dried I submerged the paper for 5 mins in a bath of cold water and then stapled the paper to my board. This time round the paper was quite mushy around the staples and I feared it would just rip as it dried so I added some extra insurance in the form of gummed tape. I'm happy to say the paper dried tight with no tears.
I found a great "how to" on William Stout's website for creating an Arthur Rackham style illustration and used the steps there to prime my paper, starting with a wet wash of burnt umber to take the white sting out of the illustration. I had also read about some other techniques that involved doing a full tonal under-painting followed by washes of colour to really give the painting a glow. I didn't have the raw umber that was suggested so I used raw sienna and went over with successive washes until I had a value range I was happy with. You can probably see the raw sienna washes also took the sting out of the blacks. I had a final trick up my sleeve that I hoped might bring some pop back to them later down the track.
Step 5: colour washes
Now the fun part! Laying in successive colour washes to bring it all to life. The image on the left above shows the first few layers of green and the image on the right is a reasonably advanced stage of the colouring step. I used a mixture if raw sienna and burnt umber for the browns and ultramarine blue, lemon yellow and a bit of burnt umber for the greens. Lemon yellow, permanent rose and china white gave me the flesh tones and I used a mix of ultramarine blue and permanent rose for the purple shadows.

Step 6: the final touches
During the final stages I push the contrasts as far as I dare and add some highlights (sparingly) with white gouache. I also used William Stout's suggestion of a final wash of sepia ink (very diluted) across the whole illustration to unify the illustration and bring a little bit of pop back to the lines. I noticed this led to some unwanted wash lines when it dried but they were easily blended out with a wet brush.
Done (for now) and now onto my next idea. More to come on that soon.

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