First day actually painting with color. I think the study helped even if it is a significantly different medium.

I love Procreate, but digital is a medium in and of itself with as much, if not more, to learn in order to execute exactly what you want. It's certainly not any "easier" than traditional painting in my experience. You can apply traditional methodology, but it doesn't replicate the process or experience of a particular medium 1 to 1. I do find it to be good thinking practice for how to execute something with traditional media. My utilization is limited though. I go to digital for specific needs, stylized line work cartoons/comics, quick simplified studies, or iteration/thumbnails with a hard round brush. Often I'll take a photo of a traditional piece I'm working on and bring it into Procreate to experiment with where I might want to go next before applying that idea to the original piece. I think it's an incredibly powerful tool for simplifying and thinking through the process I'm going to execute with traditional tools, but I don't turn to digital to practice painting, I just find it to be too fiddly, and ultimately lacking, but I haven't put the miles into it. I think you're getting some good results with it here though. If you were to take another pass to refine what you have you could really bring that portrait to a glorious finish, but you might just want to jump into the actual painting at this point. The hard round brush is always recommended as the brush to learn digital with because of how limiting it is to work with at first, but you'll quickly get an idea of how to adjust the settings to get what you're looking for. I resisted using the hard round for a long time, but when I finally leaned into it, I got a lot more out of using digital. Digital brushes are kind of single use effects even with their infinite tweak-ability, but you have to know how to tweak the brush engine to your needs. A traditional brush, with paint, on a surface is more immediate, and in my opinion easier to control intuitively.