Wild Mage

This is the third and last of three recent portraits I've painted. These are part of a study I did of a quite popular artist here on Deviantart who goes by Sakimichan. I wanted to take an approach to doing semi-realistic portraits, strong colors and increase my speed when painting all things she excels at. Overall this was a success as I produced this painting in considerably less time than I normally spend and learned a number of techniques and ideas of lighting usage while working on this and the other two portraits. I did reference several of Sakimichan's paintings while working on these, I did not copy them however but they do hold similar pose, characteristics, etc. to some of her paintings. I hope she takes this as flattering and it is all an attempt to learn on my part. I did use one stock texture in this work, I'm not one to normally do this but wanted to experiment a bit as I have seen others do. The blue magic smoke effect is from a stock photo from cgtextures which have free full usage rights.