Need Cel Help

[Shizzle Bam Boom-]

Hey there everyone,
I haven't posted in ages I know. School has been slapping me around a bit. Also, I lack a scanner, so all the line art I come up with sits around my apartment. Anyways, I had someone scan some line art and here I am trying to colour it.

But I haven't cel shaded in years. Honestly, I've been doing a lot of digital painting and no cel shading. I started with the painting on this piece:
RO Acolyte- Paint

But, the lines are thick. I made it with micron pens. So of course, it would be advisable to do it in cel shade style, right?
But something isn't looking right with it:
RO Acolyte- Cel

I can't get it. It looks horrible to me, which may be a combination of my perfectionism or just that darn little affliction artists get into sometimes about their own work. Either way, it looks really bad to me. Really n00b. Can I get some advice on this please?

Also, I have another piece and this is what it looks like so far:
Richard- Cel

I like the eye..... But thats about it. Some of the shirt is ok. But I can't see what exactly I need to do to make it look better. This one also looks pretty bad in my opinion.

All help is appreciated.  

[Shizzle Bam Boom-]

.....
Okay. Not a single word of advice?  

[GB_Lady]

Hmm...what you could do is add more colors to your pallette if you want to make the cell style coloring more elaborate. For instance, the aco robe can have 3 shades of color with one highlight color. You can keep increasing the number of shades or highlights to your liking.

Also, I notice that for the dark shades on the face, you have a tinge of grey to it. I've read several sources saying not to use colors with black tints to them, but to instead, use darker err... saturated colors where you can see a tint of color.

Cell-shading looks suitable for the line-art, but you can feel free to keep experimenting. You're using Adobe Photoshop, right? You could try going to blur then gaussian blur on the layers with cell-shading to get soft-cell-shading.

The Richard cell is nice and clean, but you could add a highlight to his face, specifically around the cheek bone closest to the light. Once again, with the skin, you can try to use a more saturated shade instead of one tinted with a bit of black. It all depends on what you feel like doing. I hope that helps. ^^;