Warm up painting? (...and process!)

So I began this as a quick warmup and ended up spending 3+ hours on it. It was an interesting experiment, but I took alot of risks in order to make it work (even with using direct photo reference.) I will stick with my typical greyscale-to-color for now.  Besides it would take ALOT of effort to make this work on a full blown illustration.

Process:
FINAL LINES: Basically I began with a photo reference, sketched it a few times (until I knew the essentials), and then redrew it from memory (only refering to the photo occasionally.) I also utilized my DRAW-ERASE method (see last few blog posts for explanation) to get my final lines.

COLOR BASE: Next, instead of doing a greyscale painting, I began with a color base, with bold shadows (which I feathered down later in the FINAL stage.) For the sake of experimenting I extracted my dark base colors from my photo reference, altered them to work, and then changed them even more with photoshop's settings.  Next I added the next value of color using my own methods with photoshop color-theory. (Basically you would barely recognize the photo in connection with this illustration.  I have idealized, stylized, and simplified all of it. Which, is JUST the way I like it.)

FINAL: Finally I painted, adjusted everything multiple times, threw in a dozen or so cheap tricks, painted some more...until I was either too tired of working on this, or felt somewhat satisfied with the results (as much as I could be for a WARMP-up painting. X_x haha!)