Mhugo, thanks a lot!
carly801, thank you very much! Both of these images were done using Corel Painter 9. I use Adobe Photoshop rarely, mainly for the dodge tool, the fireflies in the second picture were done with it. I don't have any fancy techniques, I paint everything on one layer, using mainly these brushes: the clumpy brush and the tapered oils brush from artists' oils, the triangular oil pastel and the chunky oil pastel from oil pastels. the background of the gunman picture was done with the clumpy brush. I hope this helped.
Here's my latest. I'm not quite happy with how it turned out, but for now I'm done with it.

CGHubFacebook - more sketches, progress steps and random doodles :)