I've really been needing to say something about this... for a long time now.

Problem is I won't actually know when I'm getting there, till after I've already crossed that threshold. See the problem with how I "improve" apparently, is that it's been mostly meditative and tangential-at-best to actually practicing the work. As a result it's always been a bitch and a half to keep focused on just getting any images finished when I didn't understand how to just make it look right the FIRST time. That only made the whole ADHD issue worse which I won't go into here (gonna make a separate journal for that topic one day here).

In any case, I'm just finally now starting to get that stuff under control. It's actually a lot harder than I think people realize. It requires visualizing the entire space from the sketching phase. Otherwise it gets too muddled in conflicting shades, to appeal to most people's untrained eyeballs. I guess it stems back to some of my earliest work. For many years after coloring it (this image: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/370090/ ) I couldn't figure out why it seemed to resonate as well as it did with a lot of people who couldn't seem to give a crap about all my other newb work at the time. It was a complete fluke that any part of it turned out the way it did.

I'm noticing now that a lot of people made that mistake. It's HARD to learn the fundamentals in the right order. But I also will need that understanding to make more convincing renders (now that I actually have enough RAM for more than a 1000 polys in CG modeling). And that's my ultimate goal here b/c I feel 2D has gotten overcrowded.