/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

The ability to utilize references is an indispensable tool in the artist's toolkit; but the ability to draw without reference is also useful; and can be done for any number of reasons: just to have fun, to further develop your own style, to facilitate drawing more freely and directly from the mind, etc.

I'm no master artist - that much is clear. But, when drawing without a reference, what steps do you take in your art process?

So far, I've boiled my process down to 5 steps:
1. Draw a 'rough' from your imagination. This will guide your hand when trying to make your line-art.
2. Draw a cleaner, line-art version of the rough that you drew in the previous step.
3. Horizontally flip the line-art so that you notice how fucked-up it looked without you even noticing. Make adjustments here and there (I use photoshop's transform tool) until it looks decent both when flipped, and when non-flipped.
4. Fill in your line-art with colors.
5. Texture and shade dat shit.