This concept was an exploration to see how far I could push the Gnome in World of Warcraft while maintaining the style of the game and the vibe of the original model.  The process of creating this concept was a little different than my usual approach given that It started as a screenshot of the existing model rather than a digital/pencil sketch.  Photoshop has a ton of awesome push/pull features that allow you to quickly adjust proportions on a sketch or screenshot which I used extensively to get started with this painting. Smudge allows you to work directly on your canvas, but tends to get blurry very quickly so I use Filter>Liquify which can be a bit slower (and opens up in a new window),but it maintains all of your detail much better than Smudge.  After establishing a good basic form, I darkened everything down, layered on some texture (detailed in earlier posts) and got to work.   All the painting was done with a combination of Oil and Smudge brushes, the crosshatching is a Colored Pencil brush brought in at the very end to accentuate hard edges.  On a final note, even though this started out as a little 4X4 inch 72 DPI screenshot – I wanted the final product to look like a painting, not a paint-over of a screenshot.  Building up value from dark to light and adding things like obvious brush strokes at the base of his neck go a long way to support that painterly style.