Fuck, you don't HAVE a tablet? That all LOOKS like tablet work! I really do like your style. I need to put a lot more practice in to really get to grips with computer art properly (you can check my LiveJournal for one or two of my attempts).

What software do you use? Photoshop? PSP? Illustraitor? And, more importantly, how the heck do you get that clean, crisp quality: especially with those grey areas, like the bus stop scene?

I tend to use Photoshop, with a fucking HUGE work area (usually A3). I start with a white background, add a layer to that and draw on the new layer. Then I add colour and clearer lines etc. on individual layers above that, ie: I have one layer for skin highlights, one for midtones and another for shadows etc. Allows for a greater deal of control that way :-).

Ok, for those areas it's actually a little trick. I set 3 layers : Background, Shadow (gray areas) and Lineart.

The background is totally white, and I draw on the Lineart layer. Then, I use black to fill in the WHOLE Shadow layer, and I reduce its transparency to say, 30%. This gives it a nice faded gray and allows you to see the line art.

Then I use the freewand selection (or whatever it is) to select the areas I want light/highlighted and CTRL+X, cut them out which gives way to the white Background layer.

This technique is actually a reverse of what most artists do; they usually just fill in the shadows but judging where their light source is. This is filling in the light source areas.. little difference but just a reverse process that's quite interesting to me.

Right, you can see that greydawn.gif in my folder is the first time I tried this technique, and bus stop was my second try at it. I liked it very much :D