Trying to work on creating more stylized assets, first time painting a texture by hand. Let me know what I can improve on, Thanks!

I like the hammered metal a lot, looks very nice.
You could add an occasional scratch or dent in the metal parts, to give it some variation and make it look used. 

The wrapping on the handle falls a bit out of place - the white lines on the leather look very sharp an thin, while the other materials of the sword look softer and have more exaggarated/thicker edges. I'd maybe try losely painting over those white lines with a similar color, or maybe a brighter leather color, simulating some highlights.

The gem could be a bit more subtle. What I'd try is to give it some darker areas, as if the dark metal tones were shining through the transparency of the gem (just painting-wise, I don't mean actually making the gem transparent, that would probably look weird).
I then would also add some white highlights, and make some areas brighter and others darker, to articulate the 3D shape of it a bit more. Of course that only works given you stick to the current diffuse-only look and don't plant to make this a PBR material at some point, or giving it a spec map or something.

Here's a nice way of painting gems by conceptcookie. I really wouldn't be afraid to go all out on the painting and adding shading etc. directly to the texture.

Thanks for the feedback, and especially those sample gems! I was definitely thinking of going back for some dings and scratches for the metal. I hadn't thought of the irregularity of the lines on the grip, now that you mention it it really does look a little out of place.

I'll just have to practice some more, thanks!

Me again, I modeled and texture this here axe, 406 triangles, 512x512 texture map. I tried to make it look more weathered, I'll still have to try painting a gem like what was suggested sometime soon. Let me know what you think! I love hearing the feedback.

Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/6CoIR

Thanks!

These are great!  

I never got on with texture painting in blender as it didn't intuitively seem to support layers, you could do it at the time, but it was quite convoluted. And I make loads of mistakes and like being able to go back and edit a layer non-destructively. How did you manage doing the layers?

Thank you! 

I haven’t messed around with actually having separated layers. I have just been saving iterations of the texture to go back to if I mess up too bad! I did the wood grain first until I was happy with it, then drew the wrap and metal supports on top of it. 

The axe looks lovely! 

The following feedback is purely from a stylistic perspective. The texture painting you did looks very good the way it is now.
What I might try if I were you would be to make the scale of the textures fit better with the silhouette of the axe. The wood looks almost a bit too detailed, the grain shapes are very small. If you keep the textures at that scale I'd maybe add some geometry details to especially the shaft and make it vary a bit in thickness, maybe also give it a light curve in the shape.

Alternatively you could just exaggerate the detail size a bit. Attached I have some quick sketches, maybe those help illustrate my point. Basically increase the beveling on the details, scale the scratches up and reduce the fiber count on the wood. I also added some dents to the metal, as important as scratches are, it's nice to alternate between scratches and dents.

But again, the axe looks very good as is and is very well done. 

If I made it myself I'd probably consider it perfect :), but in the spirit of constructive criticism, I've been wondering what the blade is supposed to be made out of. It kind of looks more ceramic than steel to me, personally. Maybe it's just me, but if it's the latter option, there was a suggestion in the sidebar: https://sketchfab.com/models/9b9c186f7aea421e9729cf3ba8d6f04c?ref=related . It's about the "specularity" of the edge. Yours is kind of smoothly spread out... so it doesn't actually look specular and reflective. I know it isn't actually a specular material, but there are ways to indicate that the color changes depending on the angle.