Looking great!!

I think it is looking really nice sam.

It's looking quite nice already. To me, you could use some softer gradients to break the "hardness" in some places, at the moment everything is hard, although the structure is quite defined, but some softer gradients in place would make the image more interesting I guess. I think at this stage is more about looking at the kind of style you want to achieve rather than looking for advice without constraints.

I would just add a little texture to avoid the plastic effect.

Hey Asian Sam, To be honest with you, it doesn't really matter. All employers want to know is if you can design, draw and paint. The shape of your brush makes no difference. One way is not "better" than another way. What is important is, do you have the skills to do the job. period. I think your stuff looks nice, and that you should continue to build a portfolio.

im not an expert but looking at your first painting all the edges in it are hard. You typically want to vary up your edges with some of them being soft where the form curves away from the light, as opposed to everything being hard. Now a robot like the one you’ve painted will typically have a lot of harder edges but there’s still surfaces that are rounded. Try and find some really good reference of mechs or robots from some really high budget films (like pacific rim maybe) where they will have spent a great deal of time and money properly rendering out a robot. It’s the closest you can get to studying a robot mécha from life because well they’re not real. Hope this helps

Here’s my older style of rendering, I don’t know which one is better