Then if you wish to go to illustration style I highly recommend you Corel Painter and a Wacom graphic tablet. You can have both for the same price, usually Painter Classic is included with tablet. Try a A4 or better a A4+ tablet. That's for the tools. Now for the work, the best advice I could give you is to learn from masters. Not by questionning but by watching at their work, paying attention to the light they used, the shadows they put, the several materials effects, the general composition of their scenes and so on. By "masters", I am NOT refering to anyone posting here but to true master painters such as Ingres, Der, El Greco, Dali (that's for the classical ones) or Valejo, Serpieri, Royo, Sorayama, Shirow, Bell, Matthews (for the recent ones). What you need to do is looking at carefully and analyse what you see. Try to find the errors in their work, there are always a few ones then go back to your own pics and do the same. The main purpose of this exercise is to train your eyes to be critical and will allow you to make a bunch of progress. I hope it will help you as much as it did for me. :) Oh! One last word! Do not ever try to apply this method to other people's work in here, you gonna get much troubles...