After you've prepared your piece, you can now start colouring it. Here's a step by step account on how I usually colour my pieces. Okay, it's not exactly detailed, but I think it should cover almost everything *:D Here, I'm using my friend Raz's drawing to demonstrate this. Actually, colouring artwork takes practice and some artistic knowledge. It does help to know what your art program can do, so playing around with your art program and experimenting is highly encouraged :)

1. Start with basic colours Fill in your drawing with your basic colours, you can work on the other details later. I usually start off with the skin. Create a new layer for every colour you use. This would make further work on it easier. This way, you can paint a section without affecting the other sections.
2. Change For this piece, I shifted the position of the eye, added a mouth and adjusted the nose. You can do this before you start colouring, and not after, like what I did! Look, I even added socks!
3. Darken and Lighten I create a new layer for every effect I make. For instance, after painting the base colour for the hair, I create a new layer, choose a darker shade of brown and paint so it looks 3D. After that, I create another new layer and use a lighter shade of brown. When you've created all the effects you want, you can merge down (Ctrl - E) the layers and burn or dodge them.	Burn tool   Dodge tool
4. Special effects Now comes the exciting part. Choose the colour. At the brush section (AP6.0), choose the option Colour Dodge, adjusted the opacity I wanted and voila. A nice sparkling eye. Create a new layer for the hair shine. Choose the colour you want, and airbrush it with a lower opacity, maybe 30% to 60%. Use the smudge tool and smudge it whatever way you like. Burn and dodge it for desired effect. Continue to add your special effects and add a background. I used Filters > Lighting effects >Lens flare for the light. The grass? I painstakingly smudge it :) There you have it! Here's the finished product.  Want to learn how to burn and dodge?

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