Texturing of the arm has worked well. I used a gaussian blur in photoshop options to blur the skin tone brushes and it has created an even pattern.  

 

Trying to make better use of the hypershade options and tool. I had many unused nodes which I was able to delete through the edit option and now feel that my workspace is easier to navigate as well as having more options to edit with. For me visually this is easier to see the links between each of the texture. It would be far more functional if maya had a back button. 

Making use of the layers options allows me to get rid of the other parts of the model without having 

One the major issues I had created in my hair was that the hair was only one sided. While I had intended to make full advantage of Maya's transparency abilities to create layers of realistic looking hair, I felt this didn't suit my character and didn't quite look right on the model. I looked into making the planes themselves double sided but found this was for creating textures with a different image or texture on the opposing side. This was a little complex and if nothing else unnecessary. I was able to extrude the hair from the faces on the object's own axis to create a thicker and 3D piece of hair. I am very pleased that this went successfully and without much issue.