O no! t3h grad13nt!!!1!
Erm, ahem. Not very bad at all for a first piece. The face is good.
The crits:
Firstly, the lines. The lineart isn't too bad, but the legs look oddly bent. You might want to give them actual knees rather than have them just curve. Have them be like > instead of ). There's also a rather awkward poppouttage by
his right armpit. The axe could use some work, and the near arm has an odd bulge inward right at his head. The same arm (arg!) lacks an elbow. Like the legs, it just bends. The belt could use a bit more curves.
Secondly the colors. Please tell me that you didn't use all those colors in that palette.
. You can easily reduce those to maybe less than 16 by using the same color in multiple areas and for multiple textures and adding a bit of hue shift like you have on the far pant leg. Up the contrast.
Thirdly the shading. You've got pointless gradients galore, such as on the pants, the axe-head, the shirt...you get the idea. It looks like you tried giving him a lightsource (to the left side of the pic) but you went about it all wrong. Don't just lighten things that get close to the designated lightsource. You have to take a lightsource and then figure out where the light would hit and where it would be blocked out by other objects. When I first looked at this I thought he had high shoulders and small arms (=_=') This could be fixed by changing the forearm and the upper-arm to different lightnesses rather than the single tone you have now. As I said, I like the face, but make sure you keep its lighting consistent with the rest of the image. Also, reckoning back to colors, increase its contrast. Great expression but it's hard to make out.
Hope this helps,
Good job,
Keep up the work,
[encourage].
Oh, and Hi.