Photoshop practice

Well I've really struggled with learning to paint in photoshop. I think I probably shouldn't have made the Fancy Animal assignment from the Magic Box course as my first try at it. This is where I'm at with it right now and I'm not very happy with it and I seem to keep making it worse every time I work on it. I am learning a lot though and I'll likely start over again with it.
I decided that I needed to do something a bit simpler so I've taken a picture from Preston Blair's Advanced Animation (first edition) that I got from Animation Resources and used it for painting practice. These drawings are perfect for this because they are so simple and yet every line is informative and describes the shape and form of the character.
I practiced some of the photoshop lesson that I learned on Matt Khor's Ctrl Paint tutorials.
I traced the drawing using the paintbrush tool in black and kept that on a separate layer. Then I painted in the whole character silhouette with a bright red. I used the locked transparent pixels to roughly paint in the main colors over this. I then used clipping masks to refine my painting over this. I used the locked transparent pixels to color the line work and then just added a bit more detail and smoothed out the lines on top of that.  It worked quite well and I'll probably use this approach again. I used Chris Oatley's Carlson brushes for all of the painting. His brushes are amazing!