Howl's Moving castle fanart - tutorial

I've been working on this picture for a very long time now! But today I thought it was time to finish it.

I will show you it as an tutorial in case you want to try something similar yourselves.

Here, have some music from the movie to go with the picture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGetv40FkI

1. First off, have an idea. You won't get very far without one. Just let your imagination flow. I had this picture with Howl from Howl's moving castle in my head. Him standing in the middle surrounded by bright colors and just looking magical.
So I started to do a light sketch of how I wanted him to look (left drawing). It doesn't have to be perfect at all, it's just a sketch!
When I thought I got the right pose for him I started to work on the actual size Howl (right drawing) that I wanted in the center of my drawing.
I fixed his jacket, hair, legs etc. and I even added Calcifer (the fire).

2. When I was satisfied with his look I traced him over to the center of a aquarelle-paper with the help of a light table.

3. None of this was planned at all. I just thought it would be nice with some diamonds since Howl has them on his jacket. But then it looked so empty between him and the diamonds so I started adding some other characters from the movie, just the same way I did with Howl.

4. After adding all of the characters and all of the diamonds I filled all the lines with a black 0.05 marker. I like my lines thin. I used an eraser and erased all the leftovers from my pencil. (make sure that the marker has dried before you start to erase or it will smudge).
Then it was time to start with the background. I wanted to go all crazy with my background without having to think about smudging it over to my characters or diamonds. So I just covered the areas that I wanted to stay white with liquid masking film. 

5. I took one of my larger brushes, a number 8, da vinci-cosmotop-nova. I got some sea salt and regular salt from the kitchen and I started going wild with my colors.

6. I take color after color and smudge them into each other to make these beautiful transitions. I also use a lot of water so that i easily can work with them without any problems. I also pour some salt on it here and there to make some really cool effects.  

7. There we have it! It looks really messy right now, but that will be fixed after we remove the liquid masking film.

8. See the difference? I think it turned out beautiful!
You basically just peel the masking fluid with your fingers and nails when the color has dried and you get these awesome white areas left. 

9. After this I started working on the characters. I love working with shadows. I think it adds such a nice effect and texture to the painting.

10. I just keep painting them one after another.

11. After painting the characters I felt that I didn't want to leave the diamonds all white. So I tried some different patterns and such, but it just didn't look right, so I made half of the diamonds all black. It looks pretty neat and it gives a very dramatic effect.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that you got lots of inspiration.
Remember everything can't turn out perfect every-time. I even have some things that I would like to change about this picture, but there's not much to do about that now.