Pig skin piece, first attempt at pigskin shading. Feedback/tips appreciated

First piece I've done on pigskin, couldn't get stencil to transfer so had to freehand. First attempt at shading a piece as well. Have been practicing for 2-3 weeks at this point, so any and all feedback greatly appreciated.

Having read some other posts, I used a 5RL and a 7M, just a couple cheap dragonhawk coil machines.

That looks pretty good to me considering it’s your first one and freehand!

Is there anything you would change about it?

Chopper20 said:

That looks pretty good to me considering it’s your first one and freehand!

Is there anything you would change about it?

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There's a few places I'd rather put the shading in slightly different positions, I tried to make it work for me but my shading ends up a bit scratchy/lined for some reason and have no idea why. I have a feeling that on human skin there's a few areas that would have been hamburgered as my wash didn't go in clean and took more passes than I'd like.

Overall I'm happy with the lines though I think there's definitely room for improvement. Shading...well frankly I wish it was smoother and more even, less dotty/scratchy.

I would recommend more values, I think I only see 2. I would recomend practice filling a rectangle box with smaller boxes with your darkest value to the lightest. worry about the curves of the flower later. There some books in the premium threads that will give detailed help and opinions. Well worth the fee. One of the books recommend using spaghetti squash for mag practice (he said that it will take the ink like skin and you will see when you overwork it) and banana for lining ( I forgot the details but I assume it tares like skin if over worked). Although Nothing beats the real deal. Join the premium club, read the books, and practice what you read. After that, the questions you will come up with will be refined.

As said, if you go premium you can get access to looots of info, and will probably get much more help too. Don't want to pressure you, just telling you ?