Looks pretty good. You can smooth out the sketchiness by using pencils with softer leads, and smearing with a napkin as a blending tool. Erasers work very well for creating highlights when doing this (For something that erases without smudging a lot, I really like pen style erasers like this for my sketch work though for blending work, I find kneadable erasers really work well -and they are fun to squish- though the best tool is what works best for you). That'd make for a smoother looking skin texture, though I like how you did the highlights on the hair and the facial structure is good.

The texture on the lips turned out great, without too sharp a contrast at the edges. Also, I think you did pretty well with contrast in general. Contrast is a hard beast to tame. Without enough, everything kind of blends into eachother and it gets hard to distinguish. It can be a struggle to get to know the ins and outs.

You know, I found that darks and lights in a picture are relative. A darker dark will make a light color appear even lighter. Its pretty amazing. Oh, and the scanning process may have eaten away some of the quality. I used to have trouble scanning pencil work all the time until a friend showed me about levels.

You can get a better scan by adjusting the levels. there's a decent tutorial on it here. My friend suggested not to use the scanner software to do this part, but just scan it raw without any touch up, then do any touch up work in a digital photo editing app like Photoshop or GIMP. This works pretty well.

All in all though, good pic.