Reko! Wheeeelah! A brief look at how I colored this pic. Ooooh, ahhh.
	1. Ooops.. ok so I forgot to save a pic of the linework, before I started coloring. No biggie. Anyway, after doing the linework, I lay down a color so I'm painting on something other than plain white, which helps judging the tones a bit. I always like to start with the skin, and for some reason I like to jump right in with the shading on it, as well. I suppose it helps me get a feel of where I want the light to come from (well, a better feel as usually I try to think about this when I'm working on the sketch). Speaking of the linework, her main form was one layer, her hair another, and I actually did the skirt and tie on another, so as not to disturb any lines that I actually liked. Note that here I still have random hair lines intersecting her body. I'm just lazy that way sometimes. Er I mean, that's a reminder to myself of where the hair will be going.
	2. Ok, now I lay down the base colors for the larger chunks of the pic. I did each of these on an individual layer. Many times I actually do the hair roughs right after the skin, but I knew the hair was going to be, well, huge in this pic, so I decided I should get those other parts blocked out.
	3. PURPLE! So here I've roughed out the hair (almost forgot to take a cap! I started to fill in the left part a bit). I freehanded this mainly with the airbrush tool, and kinda just went with the flow. I decided at this point I didn't like how i had the bottom left ponytail sketched out, so I just erased those lines completely. I've also made a few new layers here for her tie, boots, hair ties, and hair.. ornament.. thing. I've also started to rough in some shading on the rest of her clothing. At this point, I usually get totally jazzed and happy, because the pic really starts to feel like it's coming together now, yay!
	4. Began shading the monstrous hair. Just using various sized brushes to help define strands, usually starting with larger sizes, then getting in with smaller ones afterwards to really add in detail. I went through about four shades of purple, starting light and then darkening as I went along.
	5. Pretty much all done with the hair (before adding the highlights, that is), so I've started on the main part of her dress, and all the silver-white areas. The main artist for Mushihime really does that nice shiny fabric well, and I wanted to try hard to do that justice. I'd lay down shading, then go in with light bleach in some spots to really make it shine.
	6. Skirt is done now, and pretty much all the other spots. This is the final image before I go in and start hilighting and adding 'detail coloring'. This is lookin' pretty sharp, but just a tad more will make it 'pop'... I also go in with a small erasor and clean up all the edges, fixing all my messy color smudges outside of the lines. Oh, and I also made one more layer for her 'little' details.. the rings and lace on her gloves and leggings, mainly.. someplace in here I also decided that she didn't have enough sleeve on her right arm, so went in and added that.
	7. This is pretty much how the image looked before I took out the plain bg and added in the butterflies. I layed some bleach on the hair, using various sizes to bring out strands and just highlight it as needed. I added a layer set on 'screen' to put in a smidge of backlighting on her, and added a few spots of color on the silver parts of her outfit. Then I made sure all my color blotches for mixing/matching colors were erased, and did the bg (a simple gradient, and a layer on top full of butterflies).
Poof! She's done!