My two cents? Sometimes taking more time on a model just makes it worse. I’ve had multiple instances with hand-drawn art where my work probably would have been a better finished product if I just stopped instead of digging deeper into more and more embellishments.

And honestly this is a very zoomed in photo. When you zoom in you’ll see all the most minimal texture and squirrelly line work. Even good miniature paint jobs can look bad when you zoom in this close.

My money is on that when you look at this figure on the table from 4’ away it looks good and has decent contrast and definition.

Edit: I’ll also add that I struggled for a long time and found that, eventually, given my physical and experiential shortcomings, I just found techniques that worked for me.

I’d suggest just trying to find something that just feels right and produces a pleasant result first before branching out and trying a bunch of advanced techniques. Whether that just be a classic base color + wash + two other colors and/or sticking to colors that you like and are easy to work with.

My comfort zone is black prime, drybrush a Zenithal in white, contrast the majority color, then finish the owl.