This is the closest that I've gotten to getting a painted look.  I don't remember if post work was done on this or not.  If I did post-work then was then it wasn't much more than maybe color adjustment.   This is A4,  I think I lost this character and light setting in a hard drive crash.  The one thing that helped in both pictures was that I didn't render in the highest quality settings.  If you like I can see if I can find the settings for the anime picture.