Christmas Gifts! 
Tried something new with each of them. Any and all critique welcome, I want to know how I can do and be better! 
First up, gouache paintings on watercolour paper, 6x10 cm. I didn't take WIP shots of the gouache paintings, which I regret now. The process for them was as follows though: Reference photo, sketch, underpainting (base colours, and for the lilies a bright blue that I wanted to show through when finished) and full painting. Here are the paintings together. The lilies were for my grandmother and the beach was for my grandfather (my greatest fans!). I've been painting a lot of small studies from life, but this was much more ambitious for me, both in size and in subject, colour, lighting, etc. I feel that I learned most from my decisions at the underpainting stage, and also when making choices over what Sorry for the wonky presentation, I took the photos while the paper was still warped from wet paint.
I used 2 references for the lilies,
one for the composition and
one for the underpainting.
For the beach, I tried to make a copy of
this photo. The references were slightly different size to the paper I painted it on so I made some minor changes to composition.
Ok, so this next one was for a Secret Santa Exchange - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure themed. My giftee asked for Diego, so Diego they got! Here's a walkthrough of the steps...
Thought the DIO letters looked better on the hat when I flipped the image. 
Here's the reference I used for the pose.
Went for colours I wouldn't usually pick (last ones) so I could challenge myself.
"Ok... now how the hell do I colour this?" Tried to keep shadows on the cool side of the colour wheel. Generally felt like I had no idea what I was doing.
After saying I was done with the image at the stage that makes up the last image in the gif above, and posting it to twitter... I felt like it wasn't working quite how I'd wanted so I came back a day later and changed some things, like making the stripes on his jersey thicker, which you can see below. I only had a day to paint it in so given that, I'm very happy with how it came out. Buuuuuut that doesn't mean I can't see a lot of issues, with the sketchy/scrappiness of it, with colour, tangents, anatomy, value... There's a lot still to improve. Values, as always! My nemesis!
In the end, I'm trying to get away from anime stuff, but I would still like to be able to use colour in an awesome way in styalised work like ้ถ/Rei or Kibstar. So much to practise and so little time. If you have any critique on this piece, I'd really love to hear it!
Cheers! Happy holidays to all!
