sketch digital painting

One of our tutorial practices was to take a sketch, and then transform it into a painting using Photoshop. After a certain amount of dilemma and consideration, I decided to go with a sketch of this lion:

(source)

And after a lot of layers and shading and colouring and blending the colours together using the smudge tool, this is what I came up with:

And this is how it looked like after I tried the "oil painting" filter: