Shepard

[Proton]

It looks like there's too much black going on in the armor, and as you can probably tell it's messing up readability. Maybe less black would work?

removing the black is confusing me when it comes to shading it well

That's currently the problem I'm having.
Removing the black is making it look worse in the end for me, because my palette choices and/or shading styles are causing problems.