This is my step-by-step thing for thee picture called "Sunset" [link]

I made this in photoshop 7.0

step 1. Just the sketch... This is where I make fast doodles of what I want in the picture. My sketches are always really really fast, and I don't clean them up at all. resulting that I usually have to clean everything up while coloring.

step 2. Quick colors. For somereason I used really light colors at this point. I usually don't do this.

step 3. Made a new layer, with a round gradient that goes from red-ish orange to dark-ish blue, from the sun to the right top corner, set this layer to "overlay" and dropped the opacity a bit. This mostly fixed the colors to what I wanted them to be. Then I flattened the whole thing (merged layers together) I don't work on more than one layer. Set my brush to "color dodge", picked some brigth orange color and made the sun. Added colors to other places and stuff.

step 4 - 7. Just fixing stuff, adding stuff, and doing other stuff. Using "color dodge" for them clouds there.

step 8. I flatten the whole image again (there were few layers, If I remember correctly) dublicate the only layer that is left, blur it a bit, set it to "overlay" and drop the opacity a bit again. Add my supercool "KL" tag at the bottom and I'm done.

There are multiple mistakes in the picture, such as the weird light coming from the right, and some of the clouds just being wrong, so you should think about what you are drawing a bit better than me.

Hope it helps... or somehow gives you joy and pleasure.

Scrapping later.