I'm rather impressed with that render (sorta a couple days late on that). And on MS Paint nonetheless. Yeah, if I were to render anything, it would require hand-drawing first, and then digitally refining/enhancing where necessary (usually using any of the Adobe programs, probably Flash for more line-arty stuff, but Illustrator to be more precise), and then making it presentable.
Unfortunately, I'm not exactly good with figure drawing, despite taking 2 drawing courses in college which had plenty of lessons on them. I can probably render best provided I have a subject/pose to base off of, but more to get proportions and expressions right, otherwise, I can have an epic body for a character, and a face that looks like what my nephew or nieces would draw.
...Yeah. Fortunately, my larger scale (non-scannable) work provide better odds of making a render look right. But again, larger renders makes certain tasks hella easier, it's just more time/resource consuming both IRL or on machine.
As for more recent/relevant topic, yes, FMA: Brotherhood is awesome so far (much quicker in story progression than the 1st anime), and Monster is just getting crazy. I didn't realize there were so many episodes to it. I only expected it to be a simple 24-26 episode series... and it's still going.