Dragon's Breath Opal

I have a weakness for Steven Universe and decided to draw my gemsona with realistic qualities, considering I had their design layed out in a reference already.

What I tend to do with these kinds of pictures is heavily reference multiple photos to get the final outcome I can be content with.

First I started out with the facial structure, referenced from this photo:

When working on it, I focused more on the jaw and cheeks in order to find the shape that best fits them.

Next, I found images for the hair; the inspiration for this was actually from my own hair texture and found two pictures that helped me shape the realistic format:

The sketch after compiling references looked like this:

From there, it's just compiling the base color then adding final shading before getting the final product:

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this picture and definitely plan to work on more like these!