Experimenting - Painterly Styles

I'm staying away from the flat, 2d look I'm used to for a while to try some new stuff in between trying to flesh out stories for the "proposal".

This is trying a paint-type of look:

or with black outlines, which gives it more contrast, but the image is softer with the brown outlines, so not really sure there

 This is still in my "cartoon-y" style, which is heavily influenced by Disney artists, in fact for the centaur lady I used concept art for Bambi as reference.

I like the soft look of it with the blotchy grass and ocean and the colour scheme, still feels a bit strange to do outlines/line art. It does make for more dynamic posing I think though...


And a more realistic look:

I used a picture "speed painting" tutorial, which had 8 progress pictures. It's not completely polished but I don't think it'd a disaster either.
This is a really really really weird technique though, with no outlines at all and distributing colours where you think you'll need them...but I'm very bad at planning ahead.
Still, it was a nice change to only use a couple of layers for once but if you make a mistake it's hell to fix up...