Hello everyone!
I have made a why-we-use-hard-brushes tutorial. It took an hour to paint so it's a fairly quick one! I am also sorry for any spelling faults in the following text.
I hope you'll benefit from at least some of the tips and techniques I present here. This is also the first tutorial I have ever made so please post your comments.

Step 1.
Rough outline. This time don't use pencil sketches as guidance – I work digitally from scratch. But if you wanna use a lineart or scanned sketches as base it works just as well.
Do not use soft brushes! Use a round brush with pressure opacity. (If you don't have a brush with these settings, you can fix one by adjusting the brushes setting.) Use 100% opacity on global tool settings.
Do not bother with details (eyes, shape of ear, lips ect) but concentrate on the contours and propotions.

Step 2.
Continue working with hard pencils. Start adding some more color! Red on cheeks/blue-ish for shadows makes the light look warmer. On the opposite – if you want cold light use very, very bright blue/turcouse for the highlights.

Step 3.
Time to begin adding some details. Work on the eyes (Remeber to paint the eyelids, otherwise the eyes will look like they are painted on skin and not very lively.). Study photos to see how the iris reflects light.

Step 4.
Now it is time to pick up the textured brushes! If you still desperately want to you a soft brush (I usually don't, but it happens) you can use it to soften up the light/shadow in the face. But I would reccomend you to use a texture brush. Much more fun, and you will achieve a surface with contrast and life-like changes in tone.
I use a rough texture brush with preassure opacity for the dread-locked hair. It you are going to paint normal hair or just want a more photo-realistic result, I recomend Linda Bergkvist's hair-painting tutorial. Find it at [link]

Step 5.
Here I've just made a quick background and given some clothes to my characters. I also put some more work on the hair.
Another useful trick is to make temporary overlay-layers to make sharp-highly saturated shadows for the nose, eyes and corners of the mouth.

Step 6.
Now she is turning out to a real Kiffar. I made the tatoo on a seperate layer, changed the blending ops to ”color”. I then made a copy of the ”face” layer and changed the light-settings so that the tatoo becomes more matte compared to the skin.

Step 7.
Alright, are we done now?
Almost, it's just time to pimp this portrait! I have several different tips to offer you on how to make a final, small adjustment that will bring some more glow and life to your painting, but this is how I made it for this tutorial:
Make a new layer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+C, and then Ctrl+V. That will make a new layer which contains all the previous layers – merged. Then go to Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur and make a slight softening effect.
Change layer settings to ”overlay” (for a darker result: use ”multiply” and if you want a bright glow change to ”Screen) Continue adjusting layer opacity and levels/saturation until you get desired result!
In this example I changed the Overlay-layer saturation to almost 0, used Gaussian blur with 2,0 radius adn then lowered layer opacity to 60%.