Commission work - super and goku vs Joker

Hi, this is a commission piece I recentlly did. It was asked by the client so I dont get credit for the ideia. Boy this was a tough one but looking at it, I really liked doing this so I wanted to share part of the process with you people!


This is the final piece.

Now some of the different stages to get to this:

This was the first layout sketch, very loose lines just to give the idea of the overall composition. The client only sugested I added some characters layed down on the floor after seeing this layout so, that´s why Supergirl, the Martian Manhunter, Gohan and Krillin do not appear here

Final pencils before inking...they are a bit loose, compared to what I normally try to do with this kind of finished pencils, but the main goal here was to ink it so, my mind wouldn´t let me tighten things up

Inks...this sure is a part where I really need to practice...I manage to do it the best I can, but I know it´s far from where it could be...
As you can see, I wanted to put some shadow work here but, in the overall I wanted to let the most of it for the coloring part...

Ufff...I think this was the most time-consuming fase of it all...getting all this different areas colored was a pain...Even though I used a really great tip I took from the awesome Nate Simpson, he was using some cool photoshop plugins,the MultiFill and Flatten Plug-In's , so I thought I´d give it a try...
It sure made the task easier, but it sill took me a lot of time to get it right..What it does is to fill every blank area with a different color, so the result was this:

After that it was just a matter of choosing the right colors, but I didn´t have to lasso-tool hand by hand every single area...so I think that saved a lot of time!

Now this was the fun part..to give it all shadows and light sources, and to change the colors as I damn pleased :D ...well...it wasn´t all fun...i wanted to make that aura as a strong light source...but I didn´t want it to be the main element..so it got a bit frustrating to get it right...but I think I managed to give it some of the balance I was looking for by adding some other lights there...

Another thing I wanted was to give a different focus on the main characters. I felt it would be too confusing to give them all the same projection, so I tried to give the ones in the back some darker colors, that way I was trying to stand out where the action is. Of course in the end I felt I needed some focus on the Joker there..so, that explains that light beam...

And that´s it...sorry for my limited english, I may have made some critical gramatical errors along the way, I hope it didn´t get too confusing ...sorry if it did! again, thank for viewing