Digital colouring tutorial

When I submitted "Covering Fire", someone asked me how I do my digital colouring and I said I'd make a tutorial out of my next digital piece.
This tutorial is a step by step recipe for how I made Bloodlust. It's a very different picture but still I had hoped that showing what I did in creating it might eventually be of some use to someone. If one person learns just one tiny thing from this than my effort was justified as far as I'm concerned.

I used Photoshop 5 all the way through to the background, so if you've got Photoshop anything then everything I'm doing here will be there for you too.

I haven't included how I did the background, but that's because it was an absolute mess, I have zero skill with backgrounds so I'm not going to poison anyone's mind with my ideas as to how one should do them.

Anyway, please let me know what you think of this. I enjoyed doing it and I think I'll do it again next time I try something on Photoshop too, I'll try and do a more metallic-y one next time too. Like I say at the end, this is not just to help others, it's also for anyone who kicks ass at Photoshop to see what I'm doing wrong and correct me, so if you have a suggestion or a comment, please let me know!