I love working with traditional media (mostly soft pastels but sometimes I use acrylic paints, watercolors and colored pencil) as much as I love working digitally. So I often find myself struggling to decide which way to go with a particular image. Sometimes I'll do several versions both digitally and traditionally and decide from there which one I like better.

I originally painted the image "Butterfly Cloud" with acrylic paint and colored pencil accents:

I liked this painting but it just wasn't quite right to me so I decided to see what I could do with it on the computer. After I scanned the painting, I outlined it in Adobe Illustrator:

Then, still in Illustrator, I played around with color combinations (which is not so easy to do with paint) and I changed her hair slightly:

And finally, I brought it into Adobe Photoshop and gave it depth using mostly bevel/emboss and shadow layer effects as well as dodge and burn brushes. Here is the final image: