Dang, the way you draw this Dragapult looks fantastic. I mean, if you feel that the shading is hard, as well as the background, you can always look at other people's examples and see how they do it. But that's just me. Still, your art style is pretty unique, even if some parts of your artwork remind me a lot of R-MK and Nun111111's artwork. Heck, even AXD-L you remind me of that artist.

Thanks!

doing the backgrounds is just going to take a lot of practice.

You're freakin' welcome. I still look at this and you pulled off the character/creature really well (very impressed).

Well, background drawing is a work in progress, but it comes with time. If you ask me, I would suggest trying the background first before the character, so this way you can line up and size proportion your character, or level/adjust the character to the surrounding background (or even draw two horizon reference liens that go from slightly off center, and meet in the center. That helps give perspective of your drawing and it will definitely help you out in the long run. And if you are doing it on traditional paper, I would have the reference lines beneath the final drawn page, so you can line up your backgrounds with the foreground character if you ask me).