Cuberush redlight challenge

I went to find a competition to finish my 3rd responsive, since I had already tried animation and succeeded with 2 of the submission I felt like doing an illustration. A friend recommended me to go on a website called cubebrush where they host weekly challenges and competitions every month, the theme of this week(15) was "redlight", I quickly thought about what I should create as I had a lot of ideas, so I started to thumbnail throughout the week trying to create a simple composition that will not take long to make as I've only got a few days to complete.

So I started with these thumbnails and tried to develop some of them, and here is the result:

So here is the process of developing the thumbnails, as this challenge is character based I had to find a composition that will give off the impression of "Red light" then I decided to go simple with a pose that would not take long to draw and with an object, floating in the air which I decided to be a red crystal.

I then started on the lineart that took a while with a bit a trouble with the hands, but I used a 3d program called DesignDoll to help me with hand reference, once the lineart was done I moved on to colouring the base.

unfortunately, I didn't save screenshots of the later stages of this drawing but I learned a lot about colouring techniques in terms of shadows and highlights, resulting in the final result which is a big jump from this piece. I looked at a few references here and there to help me with the composition and colouring, here is a Pinterest link to my board of references  

I love the final turnout and would consider this to be the bigger project out of all the briefs I've tried to work on, as it was not easy to create this piece of artwork. submitting it to the website was quite simple, all I had to do was make an account and submit to the challenge, here's a link

hope I win as it looks like I have 5 likes currently as I'm writing this blog, the more likes I get the more likely I can win which I have to wait for! 

here is the art board: