1. Select an area you want to start at with the wand tool. I usually start from the background to foreground. When I talk to people about rendering I always stress treat each element like a sphere, a cylinder or a square etc. It might be good practice to start working on just rendering those objects. It will be an easier transfer to your artwork after you get the hang of that. Ex; on the illustration above, notice the head and torso is somewhat spherical. Lighting up the center of the torso with my airbrush tool gives the illusion of the chest is rounded out toward you. Adding more cuts with your lasso tool to give it highlights and a sense of texture, same with the head. If you need to go back and adjust the color, Command-Click on the channels to select your selection.

2. In this stage I suggest to mess around with it. Play with what you think looks cool. Start playing around with your color palette. See what colors work for you when blending them with the airbrush. I like to work from dark to light, keep playing and you might come up with your own unique style.

3. As for background effects, for the above illustration I just used long airbrush strokes and gradients. I can write a book on that stuff, so just keep messing around you'll be surprised on what you come up with.

4. You can see the finished piece here.

5. After you feel comfortable you can move into a advanced stage of backlighting and mood lighting. Some good examples of that, you can see in the comic section.

We're actually not finished, though, we still have the line art in it's own channel. You might have noticed that if you Save A Copy or try to show your cool new colored artwork to your friends that the blacks aren't showing up in anything but the psd file.

1. Turn off the "eye" icon on the Alpha 1(line art) channel.

2. Go to Image-> Apply Image. In the Apply Image box you'll see a drop-down box called "Channel", in that select the Alpha 1 channel. Hit OK.

3. Bam! done.

4. Now you can throw out all your channels and layers and save it as a finished file.

In closing, I spewed out a lot of stuff and I might have confused you a bit , I know I confuse myself. In my site I have a forum and you can ask any question you like and I'll try not to make your head explode, but that would be pretty cool.

HAPPY COLORING!!

--JAY