Welding for the first time - need advice

Thanks a bunch guys, I'm going to get a bunch of practice in and then try and tackle this quarter panel patch project. Luckily the AMD patch and the metal on my quarter is thicker than this newer sheetmetal that I'm practicing on. Once I get this down, it should only get easier.

Cracked, thanks for the comments. I'm going to try your ideas and see what I can do. I feel like I had the gun pretty close to the metal so I'll back it off a bit and see what happens. Is the wire feed going too slow if you get a small piece of wire stuck in the weld once in a while?

67dart, I've ran beads on scrap iron with it but it just doesn't seem like it helps me at all with this project. The settings all have to be different and there's a ton of give with thicker metal. I can cut this fender up any which way to practice so I figure if I can get good on this fender, then doing my quarter panel patch with thicker sheetmetal will be a lot easier.