I had been trying to paint something digitally that had the creamy look I love about oil paintings, and although this still doesn't look like an oil painting, it was a lot closer than my previous efforts. I used pretty much just the palette knife brush in Painter 7 for this. Originally I wanted to do something looser, and I thought I'd limit myself to the palette knife, but in the end, the fact that any brush could be resized to do fine detail work kind of ruined the intent.

The tutorial for this painting is here.

 

Closeups:

This is the cropped/enchanced version that was used for the d'artiste: Digital Painting book cover, which I co-authored.

 

The reference for this painting was a magazine clipping I liked, but the painting looks very different from the reference, as I made significant changes to the face, the body proportions, the colors, the background, and the lighting. This piece was the last piece I based on reference that wasn't my own. Since then, I've been shooting my own reference material.