Paint!

Here's where your painting skills start. Create a new layer, and drag it beneath the sketch layer. (I've started naming the layers to help keep track of them, you can name them simply by double clicking on them) I took the colors I wanted, and using the same brush settings as before (and many different sized brushes) I simply painted in the background sky. There's no trick to this, I just painted it in like I would with actual paints. Experiment and have fun!

Why do the background first? Well, you draw the lighting and shading of your main subject from the background. It also determines the overall mood of the piece.. for this piece I wanted a moody, misty snowy day, with the light just peeking through the heavy snowclouds. Those of you who live in northern climates probably know how this kind of day feels.

And more background...

Now, because every painting you do is going to be different, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the other aspects of the background for this drawing. Just remember, the more depth you add, the more the viewer gets pulled into the painting.

Add layers, building up from the background, but always under your sketch.

The "tree shadows" layer was added to give the hint that there's more landscape behind all of that misty mountain snow. It was simply brushed in with greens and greys.

The "tree snow" layer contains both the green of the pine trees and the snow on them. Again, I simply brushed/painted the trees in with the paintbrush tool with a dark green, then added the snow where approperiate with a off-white/purple color.

The snow itself was created by drawing many, many little white dots, then copying and pasting them into subsequently larger groups. I know there's easier ways to do that, but that's just the way I did it for this image.

Note that other than the sketch layer, so far all the layers are set to "Normal".

Let's get to the good stuff...

Now to paint in the forground. You're probably looking at this image and are going, "What? that's more than one step!," and you'd be right. It's 2 steps! Kinda. But it's no more than 2 steps, really. As you can see in the layers menu, I added a new layer, and painted the rocks in. I started with greys and then added the whitish purple snow on top where I thought it would fall. Note that for the snow I used a brush with "hard edges" to create a more crisp look to the snow. If everything had soft edges it's gonna end up looking muddy and like the "typical" photoshop drawing; blurry and smudgy. Eeew.

And then I added another layer on top of the rocks; Lyosha herself! Whoa. Yes, this really is all one layer. I stared with (a brush with hard edges, again) off-white, and built her colors up from that, adding details like her black markings and eyes last. Don't shade anything yet! I know the urge is there, but we're gonna get to that soon enough :}

Just use your sketch guidelines for this part. If you find that it's too hard to see your sketch lines, go back and select the sketch layer, and change the opacity to something that you can see. Vice versa if the sketch lines are too dark and you can't see what you're doing correctly. Don't forget to use the navigator to zoom in and out to do deails more easily!