I am trying to start walling again and it has been awhile so I was wondering if anyone had critiques and suggestions for this wall that I am in the process of making.

Right now it is a wall of Gin from bleach and I am new to the painting style. I have always done cell shading and vectoring so its a challenge for me. So any tips would be great. Especially on how to make realistic hair and clothing.

My progress so far:

Hmm. You don't really have to "paint" a lot when it comes to anime characters. Anyway, my advice would be to have a clean lineart (right now it looks kind of jaggy), and do not paint with soft edges. Paint with an hard-edge brush, whatever shape it is, it has to be a hard-edge one. When mixing the colors of your palette much of the blending work is done by playing with the brush opacity (if you have a tablet you may want to turn the opacitity sensitivity setting on) and then gradually picking the mixed blended colours with the eyedropper tool and keep painting. Do NOT use smudge, that'll give a muddy look to your work. The smudge tool is only good in certain circumstances, but it's absolutely the kind of tool you have to avoid using if you really want to learn how to digitally paint.

An other suggestion I need to give you is: Do not block other kind of colours in the character right now, just the base ones, atmost do the basic shading but if possible avoid it right now. Why, you wonder? Because when making scenery illustrations it's usually wiser to start from the background elements, and then gradually work your way towards the foreground. This way you can easily get the lighting of the scenes and colors of the scene right, and once you do the character's coloring you'll be able to immediately tell what the are right colors you have to use so that the character blends well in terms of lighting and mood with the rest of the scene. If you know that the lighting is going to be "flat", meaning that there's little color influence from it, then you can color the character and then do the background, but if the lighting of whole scene is color-influenced (think of a sunset, or a night-scene, or any other scene where the source of light is "coloured" and every object, both background and foreground, are heavily influenced from it) then you might want to save the character's coloring as the last thing to do.