Here's the raw scanned pen & ink of my PBEM character, Ash, leaning up against one of the landing struts from the ship he pilots, the Lucky Credit.   Loosely based on my own features, about the same weight I was in high school, several years older, and with facial scarring from an explosive-decompression incident while he was still in the Scouts (I've no such scarring of any kind).

Filled main color areas on the character.  Pretty boring, eh?  Not to mention ugly because I maxed out the compression :)  Next up, the blended character paint.

Here the colors have been 'blended' useing the "dodge" and "burn" tools in Photoshop.

Here's the finished product.  When I originally drew the landing gear, I made the hub too far to the left.  With the magic of Photoshop I moved it over to the right more, where it should be.  Then I colored the gear in, added the background, and applied a filter to the groundplane to make it more interesting.