Part 1: Getting Started
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This tutorial is aimed towards artists and assumes you have some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop. It mostly contains the tips and tricks I've learnt over the years and does not go into complete detail on the processes.

Adobe Photoshop is my software program of choice. A long time ago I used to use Corel PhotoPaint since it was fairly cheap, but since discovering Photoshop's superiority, I'll never go back. For people who can't afford Photoshop, I recommend getting the cheaper Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's basically the same program, without CMYK colour mode and a few other changes.

If you're serious about digital illustation, you can't go without a drawing tablet. Mine is a 6" x 8" Wacom Intuos2. Although you can buy them much larger, I find it easier to work on a smaller surface since you don't have to move your arm about to draw lines. You can get 4" x 5" Wacom Graphire tablets, which are cheap and great for beginners.

For this tutorial, I've chosen everyone's favourite gambler from the Wheel of Time, Mat Cauthon. Every illustration must start somewhere, and mine starts with a particularly messy pencil sketch. I admit, I'm not very good at pencil drawing. I sketch, and there are always more lines than I need. Which is why I'm colouring right over the top. Make sure you scan your images in at a very high resolution - this way, when you do your illustration and resize it for web display afterwards, it makes your lines look even smoother, your colouring neater, and hides little mistakes. My Mat image is about 1400 x 1500 pixels in size.

The sketch is always the background layer, and each new item, such as the eyes, the hat, and the hair, is on a new layer. This makes it much easier to move things around and make adjustments to individual parts later on. Sometimes I find I have the eyes too far apart, or want to change the colour of the hair, and if everything was on the same layer this would take forever to fix.

One important thing to remember - you can never have enough reference. Gather as many photos of people, and other artist's work that you can. Use the photos to get proportions and colours right, and study other artist's work to see how they do their shading. I have a large collection of high-resolution Final Fantasy renderings on my computer and plenty of artbooks in my bookshelf which are great to study.