Max Headroom (some progress)

When I was a kid I got a Bob Ross oil painting set for Christmas. I wasn't interested in painting landscapes, so I painted a Ralph Mcquarrie like interpretation of a scene I was predicting to see in the forthcoming Star Wars Episode 1. It sucked and I quit.

In artschool (the year 2000), this klepto kid stole me 30 tubes of oil paint and 30 tubes of Gouache. I've used the gouache a couple times, but almost 9 years later I decided to give oils a try again.

It's just a hobby, something to do as an aside to my comics and illustration work. The problem is that I don't know anything about the medium. I'm starting from scratch in terms of materials, technique, etc. I spent a bunch of time just reading about how to achieve certain textures. It's pretty overwhelming.

With this painting I think I lucked out with the subject matter. This painting is a prelim painting to try and figure some technique stuff. Since Max is a computer generated character it's ok to make him plastic-like, but this made me realize that I need to figure out how to achieve more "real" skin textures.

I'm not interested in doing photo-realism...and I'm not sure I'm gonna get into painting really huge canvases, but I would like to figure the medium of oil painting out a bit, to just become a more we'll rounded artist.

I'm gonna keep updating my progress here whenever I add some more to Max. I probably won't touch this for a few days. One thing I have found out is that it can get a bit boring after a while. Unlike ink drawing I don't get the same sense of accomplishment after a painting session, but I do get a feeling that I used to get when I started drawing as a child. A feeling of "Hey, this wasn't too good, but make the next thing better."

It's also a challenge to even take a photo of the work, by the way. With flash there's glare, without its dark and blurry.

What do I do?