Ar Ru: Tutorial

[aeriiths.livejournal.com]

Since one of the challenges at landofart is to make a tutorial, I thought I'd make this tutorial for one of my soon to be released icons! Sorry about the wonky cropping for the step-by-step images in advance.
We will be taking this image and we'll turn it into this:
Difficulty: Intermediate, requires basic knowledge of adjustment layers
Translateable?: Should be? There's no Selective Colouring.

( Now class, today we're going to learn... )

If anybody has a request for a tutorial, feel free to say so. I can probably whittle another up pretty easily.

If this tutorial wasn't clear, let me know in the comments.