So, I did a doodle on some tea stained piece of scrap paper, and then decided to fiddle with it in Paint.NET (free, actually very powerful piece of software - almost like a PhotoShop Lite to use an Americanism) for no apparent reason, but it actually turned out to be really easy to 'improve' a pen & paper doodle with the help of a simple computer graphics program.

This is the doodle I did, for reference:

Figure 1: Photograph of inception doodle (not the one used to create the art)
So first I took a decent quality top-down photograph of it,then scrubbed the background (made it a single colour) and applied various filters to get the lines to become solid 'edge-like' entities, at which point the colour-filler tool is straightforward to deploy. The doodle was also separated into it's own Layer so you can run 'global' (as opposed to area-defined) effects on it without affecting the background or any other layers in the image. 

One of these effects is simply changing the 'hue' of the colour palette - which is all I've done for each of these 3 images (and turned the brightness & colour saturation down in the middle one), I didn't individually colour each one. Only the prototype has to have aesthetically pleasing colours relative to each other mapped onto it - and then literally just like transposing music, you can 'transpose' the colours and for most of the results it looks halfway decent.

Figure 2: Reaping
The smoke I did by just stretching a smudge I'd captured in a photograph and  then applying transparency and other posterising effects. i added a penumbra at the edge of the shadow as it automatically makes all shadows look about 10 times [ref? haha] better, even if it's not done particularly well - which mine isn't if you look closely.

Figure 3: Abominable Snownaught
Figure 4: Ice Skating?
The previous revision didn't include the prototype, but then I thought I might aswell in the interests of completeness (Figure 5), also have done a few different ones since this blog first went up - Figure 6 is one example.

Figure 5: Prototype template of the dead-dreadnaught

Figure 6: New colour scheme (29/01/14)