What methods do you use to color inside the lines, and to shade specific areas?

I found one of the methods that seems to have the best effect for me in Photoshop is using the pen tool for my lines, coloring manually with the pencil/brush tool, and... I'm still working on getting a method down for shading consistently.

Which brings up another question. What do you do to ensure you get consistent results from your work? That is, when you have a certain "look" you want to maintain. Do you write down values such as brush size so you can repeat it? Do you set up color palettes? Or do you just kind of wing it?