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I use to scribble my artworks with the pencil before I color them on the PC. I sometimes use Painter to sketch my drawings. I usually have the best ideas when there is no PC available, so I still make my sketches with a pencil on paper and scan them.

After you scanned your sketch you can make some adjustments. To adjust your scan, click: “image > mode > levels” you can change the dark and light colors by moving the bars. Play with it until you get a good result. For coloring I usually increase the dark colors and try to get a white background, so that the darker background won’t shine through the colors. Now save your file as a PSD format, which will include all the layers and information for you to continue working later.

First of all, I think about the colors, the athmosphere of my artwork an the source of light I want the chimp to be the “main attraction” of my artwork, so I place his face into the middle of my canvas.I choose a neutral color for the background, since the monkey himself is not very colorful.

Create a new layer by clicking "layer > new > layer”. In the options dialogue. I choose "multiply", this sets my layer into a mode that can be compared with a "watercolor painting". With the background layer with the pencil sketch of the chimp on, all the lines of the monkey will shine through my colors.

Start to add the basic colors now. I start with the darkest color and end with the lightest. I won’t use any special brushes in this tutorial, the standard brushes that come with photoshop are enough to get good results.

Ok, the basic colorscheme is done. I create a new layer, normal mode, and call it face”. Since the face is the most attracting point I start to work it out at first. While coloring the details, try to keep survey of the whole painting and don’t get lost at one part of your painting. Many unexperienced artists start to work out one part of their painting very detailed and spend too much time on it. After they are done they recognise that this part does not fit to the rest anymore and it’s getting really hard to align the rest of the painting with the finished part. So please don’t get lost and try to keep the overview.

When I paint the face I start with both eyes, add the basic colors like brown and white to them, after that I color the mouth and add the basic colors as well, after that I paint the rest of the face. When I am done with this, I start to add even more detail to the eyes and the mouth. I usually work from a darker to a lighter color.

I will need 4 layers, one for the basic coloring, one for the lights and the reflections, one for the darker parts and one for the highlights to create a 3 D looking eye. The eye is a very important part of the face, it’s said that you can see the soul of the being through the eyes. Eyes show your feelings, hey shine when you are happy, the look cloudy when you are worried or sad they show all of your feelings. The souls of animals are very pure I think so I decided to paint bright and open eyes for my chimp.

Imagine the eye: it’s not something flat, the eye is a geometric sphere and you have to treat it ike this in your painting. As you know a sphere has a part where the most light shines on it’s surface and a very dark part. The eye is just like that. Remember your lightsource, it’s where the most light can touch the eye, you can paint with a very light color there.

For the maincoloring of the eye I create a new layer called "eye_basiccolor". I start to paint the outlines of the eye, the iris and the few white parts.

I create a new layer for the dark parts and call it "eye_darkparts" and choose "multiply". Look at the screenshots to see the difference. I color the parts that i want to be darker with a dark brown, the layer is multiplied(added) to the layers below, the color darkens some parts more and some less depenings of the color they already have.

After this, it’s time to create a new layer and call it "eye_lightparts" normal mode. I start to add some reflections, the make the eye look more realistic, since the eye is always humid. After I am done I set the layer’s opacity to about 40% that makes the light look transparent and gives a glassy effect.

The last layer is the "eye_highlight" layer. Just add some light points to the eye, remembering your lightsource they will be on the upper border of the eye. There is not only one point where the light shines into the eye, there are many parts that reflect the light.

After the eyes are done I continue working on the mouth and his fur. I don’t use many different brushes, the standard brushes are just fine this time. I try to imagine the direction of the fur, never draw the lines in different directions, the fur would look cluttered then. To get a feeling for realistic fur I recommend you looking at animals, nature gives the best examples. Below are examples of the settings and technique used to paint the fur:

The following screenshots will explain best how I did the fur. Start with a dark color and dark lines than work out the lighter parts:

After I am done with my painting, I make some final adjustments. First of all, I flatten my image (Layers>Flatten image) and then use the burn and dodge tool to adjust the colors at some parts of my painting. In the end i add my signature. DONE.

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you