Manga/Anime Character Contest

Recently, I've entered into a contest at a footwear store in Toronto called Cool East Market.  They're having this contest where you draw/paint a manga or anime character that's wearing tabi socks.  Tabi socks comes from Japan where you wearing these with sandals as the socks are fitted to the stripping of the shoes.

Here a quick link to help explain it more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabi.
Also the website of the store: http://www.cooleastmarket.com

In any case, I wanted to practice a faster way of painting and valuing my works (I've haven't been very speedy lately in creating complex backgrounds).  From start to finish, it only took me about 2 days since yesterday, which is better than before if only with a simpler background;  I need to still improve myself with more complex sceneries.  My discovery for this was to paint scenery like a fine artist with oil paints:  painting with just form, shape and values.  If you were to check out the artwork scenes for the Legend of Korra from the Avatar (cartoon) series, they haven't use contours or line drawing to show each cutscene.  I personally found for myself that this is too time consuming to use line to describe each object, building or tree and then to add colour to them; you can use lines for some key plot objects with your characters, you're free to choose this, really.  Some benefits to painting like a fine artist is that you get your basic colours and values down quicker and for showing space over great distance as lines tend to flatten the scene.  So anyways, that's my titbit of art research for this piece.  Hopefully it helps out another artist out there.

Oops, I almost forgot: this is based from the manga/anime called Shaman King with Yoh, Anna and Amidamaru, Yoh's guardian ghost.  Yoh and Anna are having a stroll under a full moon on a wintry night.