Begin with a Concept Drawing
Before you can get to inking, coloring, and all that fun stuff... you need to begin with an idea or concept that can be developed in one or more sketches. Sometimes I go through many sketches before arriving at one that I wish to use for a "finished" drawing. Most digital paintings start from either a "line drawing" or a "sketch". Line drawings are fairly clean outlines (like those you might see in a coloring book) while sketches tend to be more rough and may have more of the shading etc. mapped out. When working digitall you can begin with a Line Drawing or Sketch created on the computer or scan a drawing off paper.

Sketching In Photoshop
If I am sketching or creating a line drawing on the computer I prefer to use either photoshop or Painter. I am most familer with Photoshop sp that is what I will cover here (similar techniques are used in painter).

In the case of this example I had some ideas sketched on paper for my Elf Warrior first and then I created a clean line drawing in photoshop using my earlier sketches only for reference.

You will notice in the example that some of the lines are darker and more shaded. This is something I sometimes do either as I am creating the Line Drawing or during the coloring process (so don't worry if your lines don't look like that yet - I'll cover that during coloring)

The elf warrior example was sketched with the 2 pt and 4 pt. brushes directly in Photopshop (see the Photoshop Brush tutorial for how to set up proper brush dynamics for sketching/inking).

IMPORTAINT: The line drawing should be on a layer BY ITSELF (in other words with a transparent background). You do not want to be using the common technique where the layer has a white background along with the drawing amdyou to set it to "Multiply" (as this will prevent you from coloring in the lines as easily if you wish to do that). If you have an image that you've scanned, or one that was sketched right onto a background you can get the lines into a separate layer by using Channels:

1. Promote your drawing to a layer so it is not the background later (double clicking the layer does this).
2. Open the channels menu.
3. Click the "load channel as selection" button.
4. Press the Delete key.
5. Deselect and turn on the "Lock Transparent Pixels" (see below for image showing where this is!) for the layer.
6. Paint over the layer with a large solid black (or other color) brush.
7. Your lines will now be on a separate layer.

Coloring The Line Art Itself
One of the most effective changes one can make to line art when coloring a picture is to color the line art itself. In the example above the initial line drawing is black - if you want black outlines on a picture you can simply leave this alone and color under it. In the more advanced example at the right each section is colored to match the colors that will be used under it. This can be done as the areas under are colored or ahead of time (if you know what colors you want) or after the rest of the picture is colored.
To color your line art:

1. Be sure the "Lock Transparent Pixels" is turned on in your line art layer
2. Just go over sections of the line art with a brush in different colors