Digital Art Tutorial

I've been wanting to do this ever since I took my old outdated Photoshop tutorial off the 'net. But I wanted to wait until I had a better understanding of all these programs and actually found a process I really liked. Courtesy of a little extra free time over Thanksgiving break, I have finally put this thing together.

This tutorial goes through all the steps I use to produce a piece of digital art. It covers things in Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Illustrator CS, and Corel Painter 9 (if you have different versions of these programs, you may still be able to use the tutorial but some minor or major details might be different). I hope people find this useful, as opposed to long, tedious, and redundant. I've yet to see anyone else post a tutorial on the exact same process so hoepfully you'll get something out of it.

I also apologize for how increadibly long it is. I considered dividing each step up into a different file, but that proved more complicated than I would have liked so I just stuck with this.

I apologize in advance for any typos/terrible spelling errors. The day Photoshop gets a spellcheck will be a happy day for me.

Feel free to send this link to friends and post it places and such, just please do not repost the actual tutorial itself. If you want to show it to people, send them the link to this page or my gallery, thankye.

Edit:
Thank you all so much for all the favorites and comments! I'm very honored!
Also, I've received a number of good comments that made me aware of things I should have mentioned in this desc originally:
1-A tablet is not 100% needed but there are several parts of this tutorial that will not quite work without it. For example, anything involving pressure settings like opacity transitions and line tapering.
2-If you use the pencil-linework method and don't have any tracing paper available, you can also use regular printer paper, tape it over your sketch, and put it up on a window during daylight hours...instant lightbox!

Edit 2: Thank you guys for the continued support and feedback! Just to let you new watchers/commenters know, I actually don't update this gallery anymore. You can find new art over here: