It takes some experimenting! The sandblasted steel is simpler than it looks — if you take your pencil in the lighter shade in lines across the surface, select and duplicate them all as a group (easy if they’re in their own layer), and change the copy to a darker shade, you can offset it just a tad and it gives that crazy-real look to it. Amazing what light and shadows will do. Try it again, I’ll bet you pull it off :).