So I am back to trying to learn to paint digitally.  It is an obsession and I doubt I will stop until I learn to do it as well as I want to.  It is pretty much how I have approached every other art form I have taken an interest in.
This is a Hippo Campus that I sketched out last week.  The digital part has already taken up about 3 hours of my day today.  Mostly on researching some basic functions.
I have been looking at the works in progress by other artists and they seem to have their color pallets on just a layer of their canvas and that seems to mess me up every time I try.  So I spent some time researching how to make my own color pallet on the tool bar instead of using the ready made one or just adding colors to the one that was there.  I wanted to just have the colors I wanted to use for the project, to prevent confusion.  That took some time, but it worked out well.  Now if I could just figure out how to sort the darn colors so my pinks were together and my teals were together.
Then I had to re-remember how to make my whites transparent in my sketch scan and just finally used my magic wand function and deleted the whites it selected.  Then I did a flood fill of a light teal to a dark and then roughed in the coral in a hot pink. 
This was all done with the mouse.  Now I need to unearth my WaCom tablet and actually start to do some real work.  Not that all the reasearching and learning wasn't real work, because it was.  My brain hurts to prove it.  But not much art to show for it just yet.