This is really the magical stage in creating a picture. The character suddenly takes on a great deal of intensity and light. I brighten the interesting parts of the painting until I feel it's time to stop.

Nicholas Fruttus' work, "The High Terrace," is a fantasy piece devoted to a mythical city. The section of the city illustrated by this work - "a rich and colorful environment where Laelith's leading citizens are found" - is masterfully created through Fructus' use of Photoshop to colorize his base sketch. He believes in scanning sketches, and advises, "When creating a series of illustrations it's a good idea to do all the sketches at the same time, then lay them on the floor and look at them as a group, scrutinizing the unity of the work. A computer's screen is too small; just imagine opening nine images onscreen at once." Intriguingly, once he scans the image, he chooses to convert the image to sepia for its "inking" stage; he believes this allows the paint colors to blend more easily with the lines (as opposed to say, blue or green, or perhaps even black).

Hippolyte's "London Pub" begins with a scratchboard art sketch which is scanned into Photoshop and illustrated in color. The image is largely about patterns and color, from the sketch through the final result. Here, I think that we learn something by what happens when Hippolyte flattens the image into the final - "And here, I get a surprise: my picture has become very dull!" Even at the very last moment, it is possible to discover that colors and hues aren't working quite as one expects. The only proper response? "I work on the various color layers to get the result I want."

Joel Legars "Back to School" is an illustration for a series of picture books for small children. It's a playful piece that combines cartoon-like animals and a somewhat realistic street scene, using techniques that incorporate both painting and photography. In essence, Legars used an "initial setting" (i.e., an actual picture of a street scene) and sketches of his characters to combine in what could be considered the "base" image, then proceded to use Photoshop layers to translate those components into the final product.

In "Voyage to Porto," Antoine Quaresma demonstrates various techniques in a piece designed for an illustrated book about the historical background of the city of Porto. Quaresma used photographs as source material for initial sketches which were then scanned into Photoshop. Base colors ("sky" and "ground") were used to prepare general divisions between the two major components of the image, and additional layers were slowly added. A piece of advice: "For a natural landscape, background colors must be based on a pale, faded blue. Washing out the background relative to the middle ground and foreground makes the image and accentuates the effect of perspective." The painstaking process of slowly adding layers of color to buildings, streets, and bridges is amazing, but the final result is undoubtedly worth the effort.