Space Requiem--Guardians of the North

Personal Project
Everything on the final piece is purely painted. Yeah, I literately painted the sniper rifle by hand again after I finished the design of it.
This is basically a near-futuristic sniper standing on snow with her animal companion--a Tibet Mastiff. Why Tibet Mastiff? Because there are not a lot of canines that can adapt to snow well, and an Alaskan will be too cute for having blood on its face.
For people new to concept art, this level of detail is not what I recommend achieving for character DESIGN--this piece is still my design, but it is done with illustration quality, at least for my standard. If it's only for design, the render could have much lower quality.
I was trying to call this piece finished halfway, but there were some feelings torturing me, that the design and render didn't satisfy my standard. So I kept going and took a lot more time than I thought I would do. For now, I am still not satisfied at all, and I can go at least two more rounds of render. But I think I already learned enough through the process, and the piece looks decent enough. I think it's because I was using photo bash to create quick concepts too often in the past year, so I tried to get back the happiness of actually painting something.
I still need practice, like a lot more, for photo-bashed and hand-painted concepts. But at the end of the day, we are still artists. So if you are lost when doing the jobs, please do not forget why we choose to be concept artists in the beginning.