I thought I'd kinda show everyone how I do most of my art in a step by step diagram. I might end up opening some comissions too, so these could be seen as examples of what I could offer.

So anyway, let's begin;

1. Sketch. Pretty explanatory, really; this is the scanned sketch with no cleanup and such.

2. Line art. Using the pen tool and stroke pathways method, the sketch is brought out more and cleaned up with clearer, darker lines. This is used in preparation for the coloring stages.

3. Coloring. Using the paint bucket tool, the line art is filled in with flat colors on a separate layer under the line art.

4. Shading. I do two types of shading on a separate layer here, both applied in the same way by using the magic wand to select certain sections, and applying the shading with the brush tool. The first, as shown here, is a "soft shading", which is using a soft brush tool (hardness of 0%) to apply shading which blends in gradually with the base color. Alternatively, you can use "cell shading", which is exactly the same but with 100% hardness.

5. Lighting/Highlights. These are applied to another layer or on the layer with your base colors. Many different types of highlights exist, but I went with gradient shading with this. Using the magic wand or lasso tools, select an area to which you want highlighted, and use the Gradient tool to apply a lighter color. I do this by selecting the base color and applying a Linear Dodge (Add) gradient at 25%.

6. Backgrounds and other extras. After the entire piece is done, you can add a background and any extras that would be better off adding post-completion. In this case, I added a lightning ball in Modeo's opened hand.

And that's it, really. Hope that some of you who don't draw often find this somewhat useful ^^