hell yeah

very good

OH. MY.
Arq's model looks so great! The details! The precision!
You have even used my suggestion of a romantic scene.
I don't know why, but their size difference is much more pronounced here than in other pictures. Which is awesome, I have always imagined them like this.

The lazy cheating involved in making those details!
Well, Witcher 3 soundtrack put me into the mood.
Mostly because I can't draw consistently (albeit there is a cheat to scale them correctly, but that would require doing the proportions right in the first place). Now there's a better way to cheat at it by using those models.

What cheating was involved? Is it possible to learn this power? Did you draw that fine bump and skin folds directly on a texture again or sculpted them in this time?

I scoured a search engine for closeups on elephant skin and turtle shells, cut a few good pieces out and desaturated them to be used as brushes, covered a neutral grey diffuse map with said brushes in anchored mode, then used a normal map plugin in Gimp to convert it and overlay it onto the multires normal map. It's a nice, lazy way to make detailed normal maps on a potato computer that wouldn't be able to handle the details if the brushes were to be used for sculpting them in directly.

That is not cheating, that is pure artistry. I should be using photo references and textures much more myself.

It was more a case of cheating around my computer's limitations. My main laziness regarded the eyes (copied from a different model) and the rig (also copied, then modified).

Looks really good!

Maybe I'll try when I rework the models - Arq's design might look fine on paper, but the mobility of some limbs didn't translate well into 3D space.