Korky´s Sketchbook

[Egbu]

A few things I would say are, firstly brushes do not really matter because you could use the default brush set for photoshop and achieve a painterly style. To have painterly style you should be using a bigger size of whatever brushes you have, not really blending as much, thinking about stroke economy and making each stroke count. Examples of painterly painters (lol) are people like Greg Manchess (http://www.manchess.com/) and John Singer Sargent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singer_Sargent, both artists use minimum amount of strokes to get the desired effect and read on their paintings. However it is also extremely important to have a good, solid grasp of fundamentals and while I do know you have some clue of fundamentals, I don't think you have a strong enough grasp of them ( but don't worry I haven't got a good grasp on them a lot of people haven't that is why we do studies to improve them are knowledge:) ). Things like your facial anatomy are quite off: the lips are completely straight, no real form, and they are too crisp and hard, the nose structure is broken and there are other problems as well but what I am trying to say is that you should focus more on fundamentals (anatomy, form, lighting, composition and perspective), and not worry too much about getting a painterly style, because if you try and make your strokes loose and big, to make it painterly, but you don't know why you are making the strokes and what you are trying to imply by doing them the paintings will be broken. Good luck with your future work and if you want good ways to start off learning the fundamentals the resources thread - http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-3.html is a great place full of loads of tutorials, art books and everything in between.
PS. A great person for learning facial anatomy is http://www.youtube.com/user/ProkoTV he has awesome tutorials and makes learning really fun.