/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>4727805
Bear with me because I'm retarded. I can see the image on the left uses 1 for shadows, 1 for base tone and white for shine on the skin. However when I try it really looks extremely bad as the different tones don't play nice with each other. Not only that but my base tone already looks off from the get go and I wouldn't know how to achieve something like the hair or even something subtle as the background. I have no idea about most of the tooling and I'm currently trying to figure things out as I go, since this is still my first attempt at doing a sequence my pace is extremely slow.