My thoughts exactly, especially in combination with the black and white picture...
Oh man, sad to hear but he more than earned his retirement! My favourite pieces by him are probably One winged Angel for FF7 and Answers for FF14.
For RTS I can highly recommend Beyond All Reason (BAR). It's very similar to Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander and runs on a very performant custom engine. And the best thing: it's free and open source, even though its still in active development it already has quite a stable playerbase and is extremely polished with a ton of qol features.
A good practice for drawing people is figure drawing. You try to capture the essence of a pose or a movement in just a few strokes. It helps immensely on gaining an understanding and feel of natural motion. Line of Action has a huge set of reference pictures and decent customizability. Link: Line of Action
I already did my part, but might as well spread the word among my friends.