Thinking With Portals Process

Thinking with Portals [link] is still a work in progress, but since some people wanted to see the process I took, I thought I'd put it up now.

This isn't a tutorial it's just a few steps I took to make the picture.

***MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***
1. I had a basic idea of what I wanted and that only included a Chell looking up at an enlarged Wheately in a promotional poster kinda way. Inspired by old film posters aswell.

2. Added GLaDOS, I wanted to keep her in the background because she plays more of a secondary character to Wheatley in this game, but wanted to make her look interested/curious as to what was going on.

3. Very quick values, making the focal Chell and Wheately, the main body of GLaDOS I left allot darker so Chell would stand out more.

4. Added turrets to enhance the symmetrical design a bit more, and had my first idea about adding the moon. This was done on a different layer so I could play around with positioning.

5. Added in the edgeless safety cube and a portal to ground the characters so far. Also added on different layers.

6. I really liked the overall silhouette all the characters made, so I lightened the background value to enhance it a bit. I also started playing around with how I would present it as I wanted to make it look like a poster.

7+8. The extra characters were added to balance the whole picture and I think the composition for the end picture would have worked allot better this way. But since I wanted the poster to have a sci-fi-old-school look about it, I made the choice to cut the other characters for spoiling the overall mood of the picture.

9+10. Started rendering the picture and some of the parts I rendered just enough so I didn't have to do them again.

11. One of the most important parts of my process is sleeping and dreaming , well I would have started to work on another picture instead so my mind would be fresh for the next time I looked at it but it was late anyway so I slept on it instead.

12. By this stage I've made it look more like a poster and still had allot of rendering to do. And chose to keep it in black and white.

13. Before I started drawing I used to spend my time with graphics and making forum sigs/tags/banners (whatever you want to call them), so it played a big part in this and the rest of the steps.

14. The white wall tiles were added because throughout the game all you see is broken panels. The line of dots idea come from the game aswell, if you look next to a switch you'll see a dotted line leading to a door or other objects. These were added to give the picture some motion and to break up the dark gradient value I added round the portal.

Other notes: The picture at the bottom is 100% scale.
I added the thick border at the bottom to balance the dark space at the top.
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback, I'll update the picture when it's 100% complete.

Thanks for all the comments and support so far, it really does mean allot to me