Not the best and proper way to do it , just some kinda "my way".

Pic 1. First ,I did the thumbnail on the new Alchemy software.
Open it up in Painter or Photoshop ,then resize/upsize it. Adjust the levels to make the thumbs, more light in terms of it's saturation.

Pic 2. Painting over pic 1 over some countless number of hours will result to pic2. I've used my favorite brushes in Painter , i.e. round oil, cover pencil, simple water in watercolor, eraser tool and for blending the " add water" blender, if you are using Photoshop,use a hard edged brush or in my case, i'm using cs4,use brush number# 19.

Pic 3. I've used the same" pic 2 " brushes/process here with this pic . Only i made it sure that ,since this will be my bg, i painted it with low saturation, you know for depth.

Pic 4.Combined the two using Photoshop or Painter....

Pic 5. ... then colored in Painter and Photoshop using two kinds of layer modes or blending, layer 1 on top of this black and white illustration is set to "multiply" mode with 75 percent opacity. The second layer also with 75 to 80 percent opacity is set to "overlay" mode. Using the same brushes mentioned above i tried to color away until i arrived with this pic.

Slap it with a third layer set to "soft light" then paint the hi-lites, then throw in a fourth layer and copy paste a texture( many free textures can be found here at deviantart)
adjust the color of the texture using the color balance adjuster then set it to "soft light" layer mode then lower the opacity to 3 to 10 percent. One more final color, hue saturation adjustment in Photoshop and it's done.


'Hope you picked up even just a single technique in this "process".

thanks!
-B