Thank you to everyone who posted, or just looked, I really appreciate it and have gotten quite a bit out of it so far. I am going to comment to each of you here in this post rather than filling the forum up with a dozen separate posts. :-) stewer, Miss Nancy, LillianaSapphire, fls13 - I have to admit that I only JUST figured out about the setting for "cast shadows" in the light settings so shadows in my work from over a week ago are hit and miss where shadows are concerned. I couldn't figure out why I kept having to photoshop them, LOL. I agree with you on the lights, it is one of my most challenged areas. But I DO a lot of work with the lights, it seems like half the time the darned lights take up more time than the actual image itself with all the poses, texturing etc. I really hate that poser does not show you how the lights will work. I get everything looking JUST how I want it in preview, but then when I render it is ALWAYS too dark, it drives me nuts. I can only hope that they have improved the way lights work in P7! panko - thanks, I get what you are saying, because if you are not having fun you aren't really making art from the heart, right? :-) tainted_heart - I have a method to my "one per day - bedtime is my deadline" method. I know from sad experience that if I DON'T set myself deadlines I will work my images to death - to the point where I am sick to look at them and don't want anybody else to either! Typical Virgo, LOL. In my method I am also learning something new, or improving on a weak skill each day. I have been experimenting with a lot of things, creating my own textures, using textures in different ways, using wardrobe wizard to resize outfits for other characters to fit Kiki so that I can expand my possibilities. I have been tinkering with depth of field and the camera settings and every image is a struggle for decent lighting. I'd like to think that if you look from the beginning of my gallery to now you would be able to see how I've grown in my skills with Poser. I see it anyways, and I have all of these (albeit imperfect) images to show me where I've been. :-) Acadia - I'd like to think I don't fit in a mold. I don't really see much poser art that looks like mine and if anything I try to shy away from the other styles I have seen. I never think much about how people will like the image while I am working on it, but I wouldn't be honest if I said I didn't care at all by the time I'm done... tekmonk - darn, I wish I knew how to model a paint splash because tossing around some paint might be loads of fun for my little Kiki. Perhaps I will have to take that up as a challenge! As a bonus, no clean-up required... :-) You like my lights, yeah! I do try very hard on the lights, but i realize it is a real challenge for me. I only just figured out how to set the shadows on, LOL. Thank you for the illustration on my Aviator image. It does look much better with some depth of field blurring. I think that when I rework the image I will do exactly as you have suggested. I have saved your comments out to my work folder so I don't forget. pjz99 - thank you for taking the time to comment, I found your comments to be good ones. :-) Conniekat8 - thanks for the long and detailed post! The lighting in the image you chose is one where I just about pulled my hair out. I actually had a spotlight just as you have illustrated it, but I had a problem I could not get around so I took it out. That little structure they are standing in has four corner columns, and of course the front left one was RIGHT where that spotlight needed to shine in order to look right. The model was a bit limited so I could not "hide" the column and was forced to work around it. If I moved the light to the right it shone on the background creating a shadow on the moon (!) and if I moved it to the left it was on the girl's face and looked horrible. Thanks for the kind words on my gallery. I think that on the whole I am doing well, esp. given that the maximum amount of time I work on each image is about four to five hours - sometimes a little more if I stretch bedtime out a bit (it has happened, LOL). But then I am under-slept and cranky so I try to keep that to a minimum. My goal at some point is to go back and revisit each of my images with what I've learned and the skills I have picked up and "fix them up" so that I can render them out huge (the biggest any of them are rendered now is 1200x900). Then I can order big prints, maybe a book, of all my faves to show off. Then I can start thinking about building up a portfolio... tpoys? What's that? LOL. No worries, I translate typos on the fly, I didn't even notice! :-D