Todays Painting and Thoughts

Hey. Here's todays painting. Trying really hard to just stick at it for that little bit longer to finish. I think I've got my technique down now, I juts need to work more on anatomy and composition. I'm going to enter the Imagine FX rising stars 2011 challenge. You have to be under 25 to enter, so I've not got anything to loose really. Im not holding my breath, but I just think it would be fantastic to have my work published. I really want to be taken seriously as an artist, and prove that this is what I want to do for a career. I've got until August 1st to submit my 5 best paintings, so over the next week I'm going to pick my top five and polish them off.
In terms of progress, I definitely think I'm improving. Ever since I joined conceptart.org my work has slowly got better. It's nowhere near where I want it to be, but hopefully in a year a two, I can be regarded as a professional artist. Having said that, I still have a year left on my University course, which will predominantly be 3D based work, aside from concept art for the projects. After August 1st I will start working in ZBrush again, getting myself back up to speed, ready for my final major project. I think I'm changing it slightly from the gladiator idea. I'll still be modeling characters, and still a Gladiator for that matter, but I'm going to model warriors of the past. I was thinking of doing 3 altogether. A gladiator, samurai and maybe a zulu warrior for variation. I'll write a mock up for this over the next few weeks. Anyway, thanks for looking at my artwork and reading this, cheers :)