Need advice from Digital Painters

Blarghle.

Been working on this one image for awhile, trying to experiment on a style I don't normally do (mostly because I don't know how...) But I would love to get the below image to look more like a painting (but, you know, a good painting, not just throw on a blur and darken edges...)




Left is the result of me futzing around with it, the right is the original image.

It's just... so meh. Anyway, any tutorial links or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and credit roll
Photographer: Omar R.
Model: Leira Waitt
Hair/Makeup/Wardrobe/Art Direction: ...Me...

I'm just curious why you would want a photograph to look like a digital painting??

But clarifying your take on "digital painting" would be appreciated because there's those super photo-realistic painters and then the ones that have more of a textured brush stroke in their work.

Mostly because I want to know how to do it, and it would increase my knowledge of handling my images. Also because sometimes I like the look.

A good example of what I'm talking about would be the work of Chad Michael Ward:



I understand I'm being incredibly vague, my apologies, but I don't want to necessarily say hey! I want to recreate your style! I just want to figure out what techniques and tools I could use to apply it my own way.

It looks like he digitally paints over the original photograph. He probably has custom brushes for shadows, hair, mechanical parts, and skin tone.

I imagine the only way to get better would be to find tutorials on digital art. I know imaginefx is a magazine that could help with that. Not sure about internet resources.

ok I wasn't trying to bang on you, I was just curious. :)

But like Tsujoi said it does look like he paints directly over his photographs (more so in the first example) but to do this you sort of need a background in the rendering of skintones/clothes/hair/etc rather than just "knowing how to edit" digitally.

There's plenty of tutorials on any art-forum based community. I'd highly suggest CGhub as it has some of the best combination of amateur and professional artists.
http://cghub.com/
The forums have a lot of useful tutorials and resources and the community is great.

I'm a little late to the topic, but a really good source i found useful when it came to digital painting is DeviantArt. Their tutorial section has just about everything you could ever need

One artist there in particular i learned a lot from is aquasixio (his tuts are here: link ) and this site: http://pocketmole.com/tutorials/