Very cool Alex! I actually have a bit of a proposition for ya. If you ever feel like colloborating, I'd love to ink over and color one of your pieces at some point 
As a thank you for including my guy in your sapper chicks piece 
Hey Alex as a practicing amateur hobbist im not up on all the tricks and such
whats the reason for the Gray background , you stated that its so your not painting on white but could you elaborate a bit ?
Basically it's a midtone, so it sets up the pic with a middle tone. Now if I were just going greyscale, no colors, the pic is already 1/3 done. I just need to add darks and lights. Alex Ross does this with his paintings, or so I've heard, basically, he does it all in greyscale first and then just adds color without worrying about values. Getting the values right is really hard!
By Values I mean light and dark, color has Hue(the color red, blue etc) Value(how light and dark it is), and Saturation(how intense or dull the quality of the hue), HSV, I put them in the wrong order.
I try not to color on white because the colors tend to be too intense or saturated. You get really super bright colors, and if that's what you want that's cool, but you really want more control. Even for pics with a white background, I"ll drop a middle grey background down first and take it out when I"m done.
The old masters used a combination of burnt sienna and burnt umber as a nice mid tone/underpainting, it helps to create a warm base.
It's all color theory. It's a pain, but very very useful. Hope that made sense. I'll ask Felicia to read this over later and I'll correct any mistakes I've made, she knows colors sooo much better than me!
*Felicia reminded me that it's burnt sienna AND burnt umber.
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Very cool Alex! I actually have a bit of a proposition for ya. If you ever feel like colloborating, I'd love to ink over and color one of your pieces at some point As a thank you for including my guy in your sapper chicks piece
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I might have to take you up on that one day! 
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... Felicia reminded me that it's burnt sienna AND burnt umber.
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Felicia knows all! 
PyroMindi Flying the process
Well another pic of PyroMindi, gonna paint this one(in Painter), see how it goes, here it is so far!