Welcome to Kevin's digital Painting Tutorial. During this tutorial you will find typos. Ignore them, but let me know where they are so that I may fix them in the future. Let's begin shall we...

For this tutorial, I will use this image below, an attempt to re-create it. I will be using Adobe Photoshop, which we all know and love. (Except for those who don't know or love it.)

I first open this image, and then made a new blank image of the same size. Immediately I create a new layer, because layers will help you immensly, and viciously. (By the way, I recently saw the new Dawn of the Dead, and the woman above now looks like an evil, sexy zombie of death.)

In the new layer, create the basic background color of the piece. After that, you can have as many layers on top and still always have a perfect background to work with. Make a new layer, and start blocking in the main areas of color.

On another new layer, draw in the basic outlines of things, like evil gazing eyes, noses, ears, and old timey hair with a solid, 100% opacity paint brush. For this step, as well as this entire painting, I will be using the paint brush tool. The other tools suck for now, so ignore them.

On a new layer above that, quickly shade tonal areas, and clean up the large blobs of shapes you just painted with more refined edges. Zoom for smaller areas, and it will make it alot easier, especially since you will be using a *gasp!* mouse. I used a paint brush at 50% opacity, because it lets you see what you are covering over. If you are going to be copying or recreating an image, just use the eye dropper tool to select the right color for the job.
Here's an example of where we should be at right now:

Ooooh, now we get to the good, incredibly insane, realism part. I've actually never done this myself, (recreate an image in Photoshop) so we can all learn together. Remembering to zoom in, attack the painting with a soft edged paint brush at 50% opacity. It'll feel like you're actually painting a real painting, but a lot more difficult and frustrating. If you want, you can make it feel more like painting by merging all the layers except for the background.

Paint over the old quickly shaded tones with really light ones, because you'll be going back in with more "paint" soon. I started refining the face more, blending areas, smoothing out harder edges, and all that fun painting stuff. Add some highlights and shadows during this step. An example of this is pictured below. We also get to learn a new tip: DON'T USE THE ERASER TOOL. You'll use it later though. I promise.

With the same opacity soft paint brush, add some more shadows and highlights, and keep cleaning up the piece by going over certain areas a lot. Notice I am only working on the face.
The hair will be done in a different way. *wink*

With the face fairly and fantastically finished... we can go to the hair. For the hair, use the same soft edged brush but at 100% opacity. Painting in the general areas of hair with the same basic color as in the original picture. You don't have to be too specific, just get a general understand of where everything thing is.

To create a hairy sense of really hair, you will be using the smudge tool. Set it at around 75% to 80%, and make it at around 4 points in size (depending on what dpi you are working with, that will change. Just make it thin, because hair is thin. Just so you know.)

Now start smudging. Pull lighter areas over darker areas and vice versa. The smudge tool is the greatest asset for painting little things like hair. Here I grabed light colors from the face and pulled them into the darker part of the hair. Whenever you need a little extra of a certain color, paint some more of it on and smudge some more. Here's an example of finished "painted" hair.

Here I'm almost done. Here is where you can all lots of little details like tiny highlights in the eyes, that earing, some light shades of gray on the lips, and paint some on the body I guess. The eye on the right seemed a bit big so I shrunk it down a little. I also USED THE ERASER TOOL to thin out her face, because it seemed wider that the original. I ignored the body because it was simple and all the same techniques used on the face apply everywhere else. I also really ignored the clothes because it's almost one solid color.

Viola! You are done. To add a feeling of oldness to this particular piece I added a light halftone pattern on top of it by copying the completely flattened piece into a new layer and halftoning it. For those of you working in CMYK, Photoshop won't let you do that unless to go the RGB. I did this whole piece in RGB for web purposes.

THE END...

... or is it?

Yes... it is.