I guess I need to break down and learn UV mapping. I haven't gotten into that yet, but I think I need to. I did an image yesterday where I modeled candy corn. I got the material figured out right away, by using a blend texture with a colorband. It took me over an hour to get it mapped onto the model, and then I found that as soon as I moved the model, the material didn't stay put. I expect that if I had UV mapped the thing, it would have worked a lot better.

This is an example of the kind of closed mesh I mean. I made it in Wings3D by cutting four faces on a sphere, selecting them and the top half, and intruding. This gives a concave shell inside a larger concave shell, with no holes in the mesh (This is part of a simple ice cream scoop I made for someone in the Poser forum). In Blender, I can cut a UV sphere the same way, but to do the same thing as here, the only way I can figure out how to do it is duplicate the half-sphere, scale it down slightly, the select the edge vertices four at a time to make new faces. I keep thinking there must be a simpler way to do something like that, but maybe not.

I'll keep pluggin' away, though. Blender is definitely a lot of fun.