Next, after opening my file into Painter* I'll lay down a rough bit of color with the watercolor tool** just to have something to work on and draw from as I paint. I'm not trying to fill in all the lights and shadows but I am trying to get a general feel for how I'll be using the darks and lights to move a viewers eye around the piece.

* Before I added the color however, I went in a did a little bit of in-computer editing to my sketch in Photoshop.

**A note to the Painter users in the crowd: I'm using a custom watercolor tool that works like the one in Painter 6. If you don't feel like wonking around with Painter 7's watercolor tool, you can get a similar effect by using just about any tool and painting on a "gel" layer.