...and here you have all the messing around I went through with the background and composition. I really don't recommend drawing without a solid plan, but I guess sometimes it's fun to experiment and see what works and what doesn't as you go along.
I did the whole painting in Photoshop from scratch ending up with many, many layers. The original image size is 3269x2390 pixels.
*Edit* ...and voom! Cloud appeared out of nowhere. I'm very sorry, I didn't think to save the picture as a new file while I was doing Cloud, so I have nothing in between. I did a silloutte of him first to sort out the composition, then drew him using the same method I drew Leon with.