Ah thank you for your kind words! Yes I did draw all of this, no photo manipulation. However I did take face reference and pose reference. The metal is interesting, I actually started this piece in a class I took with Donato Giancola- who is a master of painting metal. The class, actually, very much focused on how to paint metal (which is why I'm glad you like how the metal turned out!). Really, all we actually learned was to also take photos of metal in light and to use that as reference for when you paint. I know that sounds really basic and obvious, but it REALLY helped! What Donato uses are these metal-chrome balls (even like Christmas bulbs, like this images.forwallpaper.com/files/… , and he holds them or places them in the same lighting that he shoots reference for and then uses bits of them when he paints something metal in the image. So like for this image he did, cdn-images.9cloud.us/833/the_m… , he had a red Christmas ornament bulb that he took reference of.I hope that helps! Try taking your own metal reference and really you'll be surprised.