Okay so here is something different I wanted to try. This time instead of me giving a breakdown, how about you try to guess how these were made. Have I been hiding my 2D skills? Did I use Geometry nodes to simulate brush strokes? Or perhaps it’s some kind of special shader or compositing trick? Could it be that I joined the dark side of AI generated images?!
Whichever method or combination I used, I will eventually reveal it. Plus some more images.
I’ll guess it was rendered with very low samples and denoise to create the painted effect.
I have tried that and it almost never looks good. It will also never give you the larger brushstrokes with hard falloffs.
Some kind of Normal Map to make the surface look uneven + coloured Matcap as base colour? 
Painted normals?
what do you mean
That is correct! But its procedural, not painted. I have used a toon shader for the base.
This is close to what I have done, but the method shown here only works well for hard strokes. If you use a soft brush, it will end up looking like it was hammer instead of painted. Another difference is that if you look closely at mine, there are multiple layers of strokes. I will talk about this in detail in my breakdown (should be up tomorrow).
That’s awesome.
Shading breakdown:
