Wind Waker Contest steps

If your expecting a tutorial of what I do then its a little different, here I'm just dotting down points and just show you guys what my process is to making some of my art stuff

This piece is for the Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD fan art contest.

I thought mines came out pretty cool, got a good atmosphere and a decent composition, I just hope I place, well I'm sure I'll place on the 50 winners that'll have their work shown at the concert, but I wanna be the top 5 so I can win the Wind Waker HD Bundle!!
This was a good practice for me to prepare for my side idea/project that I've been thinking about, will reveal more once I gain enough practice and more planning.

So first step is thumbnail, just getting some general idea of what kind of show I want to do.

Step 2: Rough sketch, try getting some atmosphere with the gradient background, figure out the perspective.

Step 3: Add texture to background, my textures were found at http://www.cgtextures.com/, you have to join to download the high resolution things but its free.

Step 4: the perspective was a bit weird so I played around with warp mode. I was able to get the dome like perspective, still very hard to do great perspective >_<

At this point I also finished up the coloring of the characters.

Step 5: Lets add smoke!! just adding fog and smoke effects to give it more dark cold feeling.

Step 6: I didn't like the dark borders (which were suppose to be the foreground pillars) but it just didn't look right so I just took it off and WALA! open space!

Step 7: Finally I just add some more special effects and make things more shiny glowy coolness.

DONE!