/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

Still a beginner working through the Edwards book, and going to go through the rest of the sticky. But also been copying stuff from youtube tutorials just to get an idea of the process and for fun.

Just curious as to why this turned out so bad even after basically copying it step by step. The original looked nice and painterly and my copy, as you can see, looks like she's a drug addict with some kind of skin disease.

I'm guessing the primary problem is that I haven't studied light, value and color theory yet, and I'm working my way towards that for sure. But I'm wondering if this isn't also partly an issue of simply sucking at using Photoshop as well. I had trouble basically just replicating a lot of the brush strokes and blending techniques he seemed to be using. Is it generally necessary to study photoshop tutorials at some point, or will all of those blending and color techniques come naturally by just practicing the fundamentals?