Now that I've had some time to work on her, here's how the drawing gets finished:
The hull details are complete, and everything on the centerline is added. Superstructure shading takes place. Ladders, lights, companionways and standing rigging are put on. From here, we move off the centerline about ten feet and add the parts that are found there:
This is a new layer in Paint.NET. You find the inboard 6" guns, ship's boats, and one of the floatplanes. When the ship gets modernized, I only have to change the affected layer instead to trying to remember what I drew behind that object.
Then we add objects in the next ten feet, now twenty from the centerline:
Added were 3" AA guns, the outboard 6" guns, torpedo tubes, and the crane. Again, it's all in a new layer so I don't accidentally erase something beneath it when I make changes.
One more time:
Another set of boats, the catapult and an aircraft on top.
After that there are three more layers - one for items on the main deck's edge, stays and halyards; the last is always the railings. Then you essentially have the finished product, which because of the PDN layers is very easy to change or update:
Now it's ready for transferring to a template. Save as a PNG to flatten it, crop and put on the appropriate sized SB template. Fill out the title, give it a proper filename, and you're done.
That's how Redhorse draws an AU ship from start to finish. (The explanation would have been more in-depth, but I'm still deployed and have real work to do most of the day.)