Revisiting the Gorgon's Lair....(UPDATED)

This for a revise of that "Monsters & Dames" page I did for Emerald City Comic Con. Redoing the girl as a more beautiful, more Gibson-y type (the original came out too ugly!). Want to improve the whole thing so I can make some prints.

I will have my mythologically-themed turn-of-the-Century girls, Jimmy will have his Maleficent girls, and we will be raking in the bucks come Comics Fest!!

UPDATE: Here's a snap of the rest o' the piece in progress--gives an idea of what I "start" with (after drawing it all on paper and scanning it in). Girl above has already been saturated, contrasted. leveled, etc.. This one below is raw. You can see how the felt-tip marker stuff comes in very un-saturated...also, the drawing is too big to scan in one shot, so I have to do it in a bunch of pieces (this image has five different scans involved,  4 of 'em visible here--and that's not including the girl/Gorgon image at the top of this post, which was drawn larger on a different page and scanned seperately). 

I'm not only gonna splice together the different scans, I will also create distinct objects from them, (eg., the Gorgon tail and the smoking brazier with plinth are already single pieces, and I'm currently working on making the stairs a single object/layer...). I like working this way--let's me work a little looser knowing I can line things up in PhoSho and rearrange/tweak placement as needed, (fer instance, the temple got wonky in the markers [you start to blend a buncha' colors and straights start to squirm like y're working in watercolor], but I'll shore it up in the computer).

Once I've got all these "objects" sorted, I will do my levels/contrast/saturation, then integrate in the original image I did fer "Monsters & Dames." Then I'll start marrying things I liked in the old image with things in the new.

Probably you guys have better/more efficient ways of tackling jobs like this. I would be interested to hear them!

I guess the best process would be just to draw the thing perfectly and have it photographed/scanned in one piece. Sadly, I'm not that good. But I do try to avoid "making marks" in the computer--I mean even when "healing" areas or creating new parts, I use the pen/pencil work from my source scans so that the finished image is almost totally from "hand drawn" material (I do this mainly via the cut/copy and clone tools).

Part of me bristles a little at the idea of asking a computer program to "mask" my computer-based gestures as taking place in the physical world--eg., using a mouse to "draw" a pencil line or "brush" some watercolor. Is that dumb?

But now that Tom Moon has instructed me in the art of using the "MULTIPLY" function, not only will I convert completely to digital, I will be unstoppable!