i'll come up with some initial sketches, iterate them until i find something i like and want to move forward with (the desert landscape and campfire was redrawn like 5 times for example)
i'll take a photo or scan it in if i'm feeling fancy and slide that baby into photoshop, where i find a colour palette (coolors.co is a great site)
then i use the lasso tool, painstakingly go around all of the prominent items of the image and make them into new layers (very tedious to do when your picture is low res and auto select isn't useful)
i'll use standard photoshop brushes most of the time but sometimes i use
these to paint certain things and begin colouring, which again is an iterative process using the layers i just made. i never paint with absolute flat colours, i'll always set the opacity of the brush to be quite low so when i stroke over colours they'll get darker or lighter in certain areas, in this case it was the fur and in parts of the sand where i wanted to create hills and shadows. using the burn tool is also a great way to achieve this but i mainly use that for anything that has creases in it such as clothing or hair.
once all of the colouring is done and i'm happy with it i'll play around with the standard filters, rasterising each of the layers to add strokes if i feel it's necessary, or an outer shadow, stuff like that.
the last and most important part is vectorising the image, not only because i think vectors look cool as fuck but they also allow me to scale the drawing to any size i want without losing resolution. it also flattens the colours for me but doesn't make them lose their shading or sense of depth which i really like; but if i were to paint them flat outright, they would lose that altogether.
then i post them on public forums in the hopes people will like them and shower me with praise so i can beat one off to the amount of +1s it gets :^)