Eh, turns out i couldn't leave it alone after all...

Did a lot of skuff on the skin, a bit on the feathers and nothing so far on the skin.

With the skin i'm relatively happy so far, except for one patch on the neck.
The feathers definitely need more work but i'm a bit unsure how to continue.

Request for comments still stands of course (or i wouldn't be posting it here)

Niiiice scale texture! I'd add more shadows to the feathers and some detail to the horns, and remove the thick black outline around the horns. The shadow looks a bit heavy on the bottom half of its mouth.

The skull structure is generally pretty good, look at how much higher the (our) left eyebrow is from the right to see how much higher the left nostril should be from the right.

The mouth looks a little under-detailed/structured. Some work in the corner or the part right under its nose might make it more suitable..?

Are you hand-rendering those textures? Yum. :9 I wouldn't give this much blah-blah critique if I didn't love what's already there!

Thanks,
this comes at a nice time, the next few days i should have some time to continue working on this.

For the feathers i agree stronger shadows are part of what's needed i'm hoping to get a kinda iridescent effect in the end.
The horns are pretty much left from an earlier stage like that.

Shadow and mouth structure are noted, i'll see what i can do about that.

And no, i didn't do the texture by hand, i'll freely admit that i wouldn't have the patience for that. It's an overlay and a screen layer that had stuff erasered out with a texture brush (i think it was from the blur goodbrush set). Just noticed that i didn't mention it but i'm always willing to post .psd and stuff if anyone wants them.