Hand painted textures progress

cagdasx44

Hi guys,
Here I will post my hand painted stuff. I am not new to modelling or polycount but it is my first time making (trying) hand painted textures. Firstly I tried an axe concept from Max Davenport whose work you can see in here:
http://polycount.com/discussion/65561/sketchbook-max-davenport#latest

And here is the concept I will be working on. Its the one in the far right.

I started this a while ago so let me show you what I have done for now.
 
He is model info, I can show UV layout if anyone wants to know. And here is the hand painting ı am doing day 1 and 2
 
And this is day 3 last update so far.

I am really dont know what I am doing any feedback would be awesome. Thx for stopping by.

snake85027

Looking good so far. My suggestion would be to put a fake sun in your texture with an arrow of direction so you can use that as a guide. Also look at the concept and try to understand what they are conveying in the forms, for example the lava shapes look like they are pushed into the handle so they have a dark shadow around the form therefore creating a gradient outward and then a highlight depending on where you put your fake light in the photoshop file...in my example the light was upper left.  You could also cheat by creating a highpoly poly for reference and putting a light in there and seeing how the forms block the light and use that as a guide.

snake85027

Another thing, get the shapes down first and then match the color of the concept because you need shapes to pop out to make it a believable texture. Oh and use a larger range of contrast on the shadow to brightness values.