September step-by-step (Patreon)

 Thumbnail! Wanted to do something pretentious with the whole ‘freckles like constellations’ thing.

 Rather than doing clean flat colours with a pen tool, I laid on colour roughly with a painty brush (the same DAUB oil brush I used last time.) I pulled the colours from the original thumbnail. I then put a multiply layer on top and added shading with a light purple, and blush on skin with a light red.

For the background, the nebula-ish-bit done with the paint watercolour brush from last month, then blended out a bit with the standard blend tool. The stars were done with the standard droplet tool (under airbrush in Clip Studio Paint) then blended using gaussian blur, to make them feel distant. 

Colours brightened using an  overlay layer, with light pinks/oranges over the places I wanted to be brighter and dark purples over the places I wanted to be darker.

Added some blue-grey shadows on top on a normal layer.

 Painting + details! I mostly used the paint watercolour brush from last month, and was aiming to give Austen’s hair a cloud like feel, in case I decided to blend it into the nebula. Clearly this didn’t happen :) Freckles were added on a multiply layer using the standard droplet tool. I tend to use the same colour as the skin when adding freckles, then I lower the layer opacity and use the airbrush tool to lighten some freckles.

More details! Added an overlay layer on top of the background and airbrushed a light aqua-ish blue around the edges of the picture, because I wanted a bit more contrast in the colours. I clipped a layer on top of the lineart folder (which was set to multiply) and coloured on this layer to colour the lines.

 The constellations were done on a new layer, with the dotted line being one of the default Clip Studio brushes (under ‘decoration’.) I duplicated this layer and gaussian blurred it for the glowy effect.

 And done! I used a levels colour adjustment layer to increase the contrast (I like contrast, though sometimes I worry that I overdo it?) and used the transform > mesh transform tool to fix the proportions a bit (I swear, I only ever notice stuff like this after I’m done. Alas.)