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!