Wonderful work Han, great to see you back in action ;u;

I love how tactile this feels, especially for a digital piece! You didn't use Zbrush or anything for the texture on this, did you? o__O

Before I forget to respond to this later like a total dork-- nope! It was all just dickering around in Photoshop CS6, though the trick I use for texture is something anyone can use in lower versions as long as they have blending options/bevel and emboss/chisel soft or hard settings available. It's something I picked up from  Coyox's badass work, actually, and played around with to incorporate into my own stuff too.

Ooooh, wow. I didn't even think of using bevel/emboss for texture work. That is a fantastic idea! Thank you for sharing this small nugget of knowledge with me :)

Sure thing, man. I'm a little weak on explaining it here in text, but if you ever stop in on one of my streams, feel free to ask for a demo or something! I never mind sharing techniques and stuff with other people.

You just opened a whole new world to me with this! *-*

Since this is a thing of interest, I'll try to just make sure I leave enough for people to try it! This may or may not be the most eloquent thing in the world.

Basically what I do is drop in textures for the 'painterly' thing as a close to finishing step, after I've already knocked in the majority of the colors, so it can be what mostly sits on top of the canvas. You can use a lot of different brushes for it; just screw around and find one with a tooth and texture you like. I have some kind of gnarly, streaky ones that leave a nice aggressive brush bristly thing when I pair it with this technique.

You paint on a new layer over your other stuff, and set the layer to blending options > bevel/emboss. All the defaults it's set to should work fine (you can play with the though, I just tend not to) except that instead of 'smooth' for the setting, you set to 'chisel soft' instead. You can play with the light source direction too if you feel like it. Either way, that's about it! See how it plays with different brush strokes.

Also, if you want the texture but not to actually paint new color on things (so adding texture/chunky canvas grit as a finalizing step basically) you can do the exact same thing but turn the layer fill (not opacity) to 0%, which will show layer effects, but turn all the actual painting invisible. I also vary the intensity of the marks by going in with a soft airbrush eraser and dialing it back so it's not super aggressive.

Hope it helps.

This helps a ton! Wow i gotta try this now.
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain it that well ^.^

:p
Cute af

So cute!

Looking good!

I missed seeing your work~ ' u '

Quite a pokeable nose. :)

NUUUUUUUUUUUU

So cute! Love the adorable silliness of this one, and DRGN!