I agree.There are so many different art techniques available in photoshop and it,s good to be able to check out other peoples methods.Often I get stuck in a rut doing things one way,then someones tutorial opens up a whole new area to explore.The "Digitoils" link was an eye opener as well & "Painting the Dragon"- like it!

The best way to isolate a multi colour figure from a multi colour background is to carefully draw around it with the lasoo tool.(Thats the one next to the magic wand in apesnaters diagram).Once you join back up with your starting point you have made a "selection" of the figure.As its the background you want to play with go to the drop down menu "selection - inverse".Now go to edit-fill,and you can fill it with your foreground colour,or play around with it anyway you wish without affecting the figure.

Easily the best hair tutorial I have seen .Thanks for the time and trouble. Your end results remind me a lot of the hair work on Drew Posada,s stuff.He has a gallery over at ImageNETation (along with yourself),but is probably best known for his comic book colouring ,the carefull rendering of hair being one of his standout trademarks. It strikes me that your tutorial would also be of great use to would be comic colourists as well as other digital artists and I wonder if you have cosidered putting a link at the likes of www.comiccolors.com or would have any objections to someone doing so.

Like Marigold I prefer Freehand,possibly because I was taught on it,but most people I know who use both Vector & Bitmap combine "Illustrator" with "Photoshop". The two are the most compatible,as they are both designed by Adobe and have some similar styles of plug-ins. Because Vector & Bitmap are such different types of programmes I don,t think you can use one set on the other,although there may be exeptions.I believe that "Fireworks" is also Vector based,and is cheaper and aimed at web designers, although I haven,t used it myself.

Attached Link: http://www.digitalwebgold.com/index.htm

This is another method that should work in all versions of Photoshop above 3. Write your text black on a white background and flatten the image.Create a new channel in the channels pallette & select copy and paste the entire image into the new channel.Select the remaining channels & fill with white keeping only the text image stored in the new channel.Go to filters,render,lighting effects & at the bottom of the options menu on a drop down list marked "texture channels" go down to your new channel(Alpha 1, if you haven,t given it a name) & select it.Make sure the white is high box is ticked then play with the lighting effects until you can see the sort of result you want. You should now have a greyscale image which can be coloured with the hugh/saturation option(tick colorize)and then futher developed with layers such as soft/hard light etc. Try the attached link for some good metalic effect tutorials for the plate.

If your talking about something like a poser render that cuts out the figure for you, its quite simple.Go to the channels pallette and scroll down until you see the alpha channel that contains the mask.It,s normaly called something like Alpha1 by default.Select that channel only then go to the bottom of the menu where you will see an icon that looks like a circle made of dots.This is the shortcut to "load channel as selection".You can also find this option in the drop down selections menu at the top.Click on this and the selected area as defined by the alpha channel will become selected.In the case of Poser it is the figure so you will have to invert the selection to select the background.You can the delete or fill the background or better still leave the selection on the figure and copy and paste the figure to a new layer of its own.Then you can alter the background layer as you wish.

Attached Link: http://hongli.hypermart.net/

I,m not sure how scaleable they are but the above link leads to two sets of amazing truetype dingbats that contains a number of genuine Chinese characters.

One of the few things I miss from traditional painting are the "happy accidents" and thats kind of heading that way.Thanks for the tip.

Its good to see some Tutorials like this covering the sort of things that you can use in 3d rendering post production. There are a million Photoshop Tutorials out there about "how to achieve amazing text effects for your web page by running a few filters" but far to few like this one.Keep up the good work.

Attached Link: http://www.sijun.com/dhabih/

It is interesting to see someone using Photoshop as a pure painting tool & I enjoyed the insights into your artistic thinking.I know you said you are not writing it as a tutorial,but I would have liked a little more technical information,particularly on that wonderfull texture you created to use outside the window.(The nw1,link) The above link should take you to a site of another artist who paints directly in the computer with Photoshop in a manner similar to yourself. If you have not seen his work it may be of interest to you & the site includes a nice tutorial. Happy Painting.

I assume your doing post production in Photoshop & have the figure on a seperate layer.If that is the case you can create your own drop shadow effect on another layer. Drag the layer with the figure (as long as thats all thats on that layer)into duplicate layer at the bottom of the Layers pallette. Select the old (i.e.lower)of the two figure layers and go to Image-adjust-levels.Drag the black(left hand)triangle all the way to the right and you should have a black figure shape.Gaussian Blur it by about 10 and reduce the Layer opacity to the desired level.Say 50% or whatever. You can now slide the shadow to where it is required and use any of the tools,such as distort,perspective,etc to alter it as you wish,without altering the original figure. You can also use Layer effects,such as soft light to get different shadow effects or select & fill the black with other colours,such as blue for snow shadows.

Attached Link: http://www.figma.com/drawing/howto/dbryan/db_color_03.htm

I,m not 100% sure,what you are looking for,but you might want to check out the attached link which should lead to a Lightning Tutorial.

Attached Link: http://www.handson.nu/HTML/tiles.shtml

The attached link should take you to a pretty comprehensive tutorial.

I went from Photoshops 3 to 5 so forgive me if the tutorial is a bit off,or if you already know how to create a custom brush. If you are doing the Serpent from any sort of distance why not try some custom brushes. Place a series of black dots,about the sizes you want the scales to be on a white surface,make a crcular selection for the brush size then click on the brushes pallette and on define brush.Set the spacing to one (1) If you fill with a base colour then use your custom brush as a dodge then burn tool in a criss cross pattern you get some fair scaley skin effects.You can then lighten and shade where required with a dodge/burn airbrush and add a little light colour over it here & there.

Attached Link: http://www.ruku.com/covergirlintro.html

Attached is a link to a tutorial aimed at achieving that smooth glowing covergirl skin. It,s an old tutorial and took me a little while to refind,but its still a good starting point. You may need to experiment a bit with the technique,and prehaps mix it with the advice above.