SciFi and Fantasy Art: Thrush in Progress

This is an assembly of the work I've done to make this picture. I'm an utter newbie at Photoshop, and I was so happy tinkering about, that I just had to keep track of what Iw as doing...

So. I made a fairly quick pencil doodle, went over it with a sharpie marker (I don't know why), and then scanned it, saving the black and white image as a TIFF file. This I think I opened in Photshop, though I might've imported it, and it became the background layer. I made another layer based on it, and used the magenetic lasso to select the figure itself. This I then painted... except for the tattoos, which are on their own layer, so I could mess around a lot and see what looked workable. The background is another layer. It's got that gradient thing going, with 'multiple' selected in the brush options.

The painting of the figure was just fun! I have no idea what I'm doing. Sometimes I filled things with the paint bucket, sometimes I used the airbrush or the paintbrish, sometimes I smudged things (like for the shading). Sometimes I used the 'normal' setting on the paint brushes; sometimes I used the multiply. sometimes wet edges. I tried that plastic wrap effect on the trash can and the lens flare... and the plastic wrap bit on the boots seems to have vanished, so whatever. I'm just messing about and having a good time.