I get asked a lot of questions about my artwork, so I thought I'd gather them all together and try to answer them. If after reading this, there is something else you'd like to know, please send me a Note.

Thanks to those who originally asked these questions and to everyone else - thanks for reading.

Elspeth.
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"How long have you been drawing?"
I've been using Photoshop for almost 7 years now. I originally started out in Paint Shop Pro but gradually moved over to PS.
It took me a long time to feel totally comfy using PS, but now I know what I'm doing.. I think.

"Do you start from scratch. And how do you create them?"
Yes, I start from scratch.
You can see a WIP for my Carlisle & Esme portrait here That's pretty much the process I follow each time, although I do spring around a lot..especially if I'm starting to go "colour blind" on one spot, like clothes or hair.
Have a look at =c-marie's work - she has videos on YouTube that shows her process. Her Alice Cullen vid is especially good.
I wish I was as fast as her... no way would I ever be as quick as 6 hours... but that's roughly the same process as mine.

"How long does it take you to do a portrait?"
I tend to spend anything from 12-50 hours (sometimes even up to 80) on one portrait.
The reason I spend so long on each portrait is because I get caught up in the details.

"What art training do you have and do you ever do traditional art?"
None what so ever - apart from the standard basic art stuff I got at school.
No, I'm really terrible at "traditional" art.

"What software/hardware do you use for your digital painting?"
I use Photoshop CS3 and a Wacom Intuos3 tablet.

"Please write a tutorial!"
I'm glad that you liked my artwork so much that you want to know how I create it.
Unfortunately I'm not very good at describing the process since I vary it so much for each portrait. But if you look at the Photoshop Painting Tutorials section here at DeviantArt, there are plenty of excellent tutorials there that I'm sure will help get you started.

"Wow, I love your artwork. Can I use it for creating tags, sigs, a drawing or as my desktop wallpaper?"
NO, my artwork may not be used for tags, sigs, drawings or wallpapers of any kind!!

Let me explain - my artwork is fairly big.. a lot bigger than most screen resolutions.
For example my most recent pieces, "I See You" is 2400x3000 and "My Only Reason" is 3000x2400 so for either of those to fit on my own screen which has a resolution of 1920x1080 I'd need to crop quite a bit of the original.
Now who decides what to crop? I don't want to since I'd have to cut out a lot of details that I spent hours working on and I don't want someone else to do the cropping either because they could crop out what I consider to be an important feature.

Okay, granted I could resize the artwork so that it fits better as a wallpaper, but then a lot of the details would be lost and it would look just like a photo. And while I do like doing artwork that is photorealistic - I think having it scaled down would just take away so much from the depth and detailing that makes my artwork stand out as photorealistic.

Please be respectful - if you like this style of art, try learning it for yourself!