Your apple looks pretty good; your shading look right too. Here's a tip on blending... after you have the two different colored or valued strokes down, turn down the opacity to maybe half, click the right joystick button to use the color sampler tool and pick up the overlapping color, then brush down some color, then repeat these steps until your satisfied. Hope this helps.

thank you carlonarts! good idea, I'll try that!!

Jear, Color Picker is your friend! Color picking like a madman is the secret of great shading ;)

Be careful not to blend every art piece or over blend an area. If you want to maintain a painterly or brush stroked look hold back on blending. However on skin tones, blending is common. I like the painterly effect of this apple. If you wanted to approach a more realistic outcome then blending would be in order along with maybe some additional details.

i tried some of the stuff on my new apple. thanks!