I am always impressed by character portraits everyone is submitting, so I wanted to give it a shot.  My goal with this was to make something asthetic while working on several things.  Again, I wanted to work out a strategic approach.  I didn't use the monochromatic into color approach I had been using.  It was more important to me to work out things like the reflective properties of the ice sword thingy and her gold armor.  I've been interested in metals for so long, but had no confidence in my ability to render them in the pixel world, so this was a shot at that.  

I also wanted to give as much attention to detail as I could at the pixel level.  Her face was an important part (probably the most important part, as I kept going back to it while working at other parts of the piece) of the process and I really tried to study how the light would effect the contours of her face and body.  Because of the terrors of changing things back and forth and having some indecisiveness about it all, I'm actually pretty proud of how it came out at the pixel level.  As such, I don't necassarily better zoomed (at least to 2x), but I definately recommend giving it a closer peak-see for a few.  :)

There is another render (unfinished/still working piece) that has more dithering in areas on her clothing.  I didn't/don't love it though.  This render was much cleaner and I always feel like I'm overdoing it with the dithering (see my Murdoc piece) and I didn't want to tear away from what I'd already done.  

I also didn't know what background to use!  I set up a bunch (9, I think) of different colors to keep switching through and I couldn't decide which looked better.  Three Green hues and another Grey didn't make the cut as I didn't want to overload the .gif, but I wanted everyone to see the results on each color.  Maybe some suggestions in that regard?  I almost left it transparent like the preview, but I was pretty happy with some of the contrasts that were created with each of the colors.  That's my yuppie explaination as to why I have the ridiculous ammount of backgrounds.

Anyway, thanks for viewing!  I hope you like it!

*Update 3-20-18*

Changed the detail file so that the legs are more readable as individual forms and refined the shadows to give slightly more contrast.  Also changed the background to transparent so that it looks less busy.