The detailing looks great and the background suits well with the style of the characters.
I don't think there is anything wrong in spending a month on a digital artwork, given that you probably won't work on it every single minute that you have. On average, 12 hours is what I spend on my fully shaded single character artworks with simple background and without using any drawing tablets. Flat-coloured digital artwork of a character I can pull out within 3 hours in comparison.

Just practising regularly and watching tutorials for various things should do the difference at the end. I'm sure that after one hundred drawings you will be much, much faster than before it!

Heya. Thankyous for commenting!
I usually spend up to 2 hours every day on something digital, so it'd be around 50 to 60 hours in a month.
I suppose thats comparable to my non-computer drawn stuff, but I do spend at least 4 hours a day working on those ^^;; No tablet? meep! It'd take me twice as long to do anything without mine :p

Oh boy, that sounds like a lot of avoidable effort right there. Do you know which part of your drawing process takes the most of the time? Is it for example early sketching-, shading and colouring the artwork- or is it the final polishing -phase? Also, do you often revert back to the details that were supposed to be finished but yet you need to rework them out again? I'm kind of looking for symptoms that I'm familiar with...

Another question if I may ask is how much do you know about brushes? Can you for instance make a custom brush and use it to draw those clouds or those stripes on the red dragon's wings within few seconds? Here is my own example where I have used a custom brush to create somewhat realistic grass in a minute: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/21510801/

I know im going about it the wrong way ^^; the early sketch takes less then half an hour, but i just delete that part when im done. Everything else takes the time. I suppose im a bit of a perfectionist, repeatedly blurring all the colours in till its completely smooth.
Hm custom brushes. Ive thought about it but never got round to making any

We all are little perfectionists when it comes down to improving our artworks. ^^

But given what you said about spending most of your time particularly in the shading process, you disarmed me from my most concrete advices, heh! The only two suggestions, which I dare to give, are that you may want to spend slightly more time experimenting with your sketch and take a second look at the different brushes you have. It may be very rewarding at the end. For the brushes especially, do look up for some tutorials on youtube for using and creating different brushes for different situations, because some brushes are particularly useful for smoothing out surfaces more efficiently, you know.

Anyway, good luck for your future endeavours and hopefully you found some parts of my suggestions useful!

Yesh, you have been most helpful. Thankyou.
In fact in current picture im working on, which i only started 3 days ago, ive already finished much of the initial colouring. It still needs quite a bit of work to it, but its working out alright.

eh I keep replying to messages in the wrong spot XD

My pleasure and looking foward to it.

Ahh.. no worries: you aren't the only one who fails in it.

Yesh, you have been most helpful. Thankyou.
In fact in current picture im working on, which i only started 3 days ago, ive already finished much of the initial colouring. It still needs quite a bit of work to it, but its working out alright.