Wes says:

Well, first I draw 'em by hand with markers of varying lengths (or not, depending on how detailed I want them to be ;)), making sure to mark off the shaded areas in pen if I intend to shade the picture. Then I scan the drawing, fire up Paint Shop Pro, and (where applicable) convert the shading lines to a neon blue, touching up the otherwise black-and-white pic as necessary along the way. Like sometimes I'll have an errant line or something will irritate me about a pic -- like a leg being a little too long -- and I'll correct it in the program.

Then I just apply flood fills to the requisite areas of the picture to color it in, and voila! When I add backgrounds, I usually take them from video games starring the character on display -- I screencap the scenes with an emulator program and, after blowing up the images as necessary, place them in the background of the layered image in which my character drawing is the foreground. And then sometimes I'll add a glow effect to the character or blur the background, as seen above. 🙂