People have been asking me various things about how I draw so I've decided to explain some of my methods
I can't say they're amazingly awesome or anything....but they might be useful and I doubt they're worth a tutorial so this will do.

Smoothness
A few people have mentioned my drawings are smooth and this is something I always like when I draw.
I do this firstly by using A LOT of layers. Each new piece of shading or highlighting I do is on a new layer.
And I mean EACH.
This way I can move the layer around, change it's opacity or colour, it's position. If it's too hard I can use a blur or a soft eraser around the edges.
I can't stress enough how important layers are to me. When I'm happy with a couple of them I merge them to stop my layer count getting too high.

The other thing is surface blurring.
At some point I will make a copy of my face (If i still have lots of layers making up the face I do a merged-copy that just copies all layers as one) and then paste it over my original face.
I now have two identical faces on top of each other.
I surface blur the top face so it is all blurry and soft - but not very good as a finished image.
Then I go about changing that blurred layer's opacity to reveal a bit of the clear image underneath. I usually settle for around 30-40%.
But while this makes the skin look good it's not a good look for the eyes, mouth and the nose. So I erase those parts of the blurred face entirely.
I now have a kind of blurred face-mask for my original face, as if I had air-brushed the skin.

Hair
I get asked about hair a lot too...so here goes.
Most importantly is a hair brush and a reference - drawing hair can be very hard if you don't know how it falls and behaves so if you struggle with it find a good image and a good hair brush. Hair brushes are brushes made up of lots of dots that when moved across the page draw multiple strands/lines at once. They are VERY useful.

I tend to block out the hair in a mid-tone with a full opacity brush.
Then i vaguely shade in where it will be dark and where it will be light with a large airbrush. Then I go over it using the hair-brush. I use a dark colour at first and then lighter tones - I always shade before I highlight.
Then when I'm happy with it (I may have blurred parts like I did with the face) I normaly finish by copying bits I like to fill in bits I don't. It sounds like cheating but it works, so long as you alter the copied section a bit (flip it or rotate it, or make it smaller). This can really make hair look nice as it takes away any harsh-looking bits you have.

So there it is...
If I think of anything else or there is something else you would like to know about I can add to this I may also do a full blown tutorial if anyone would find it useful...
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