The following pages aren't really a tutorial, Im too lazy to explain everything step by step. To be honest, most of these come about by trial and error. A LOT of trial and error. I make things up as I go along so its hard to try to explain that. What follows are screen shots of the Kinetix image(which was my first request! yay!) in the order that I turn on the layers in photoshop. The image wasnt built up quite so straihtfowardly, I jumped around alot. But hopefully these will give you a good idea.
To conserve your download time, there will be two steps per page.
The most important thing is your base image. Try to find a model that looks at least a little like whoever your character is. The fewer extraneous clothes or jewelry, etc, the better. Its alot easier when you dont have to remove things. Also important the image quality itself. Most images on the web are pretty low quality, but with a little perseverance and a lot of patience you can find them. You wouldnt believe how hard it is to find tasteful nudes/seminudes on a web dominated by hardcore smut. Unless, of course, thats what you happen to be looking for...
I use layers an awful lot, because of my trial and error approach, and you can do some neat stuff with the layer settings. This shot I set the layer option to saturation and filled the selection with black, to provide a more nuetral base for the colors to be placed on top. I do that for a lot of the costumes, but sometimes I play with the opacity to let a little of the flesh tone influence the colors to be placed on top. The smudge tool and airbrush also come in handy to get rid of those naughty parts that good clean superheroines just shouldn't reveal.