If you are hoping for an "insight from the masters" from me... you are going to be waiting an awful long time.  I doubt I'll ever be in the master category and I bet a lot of the "real Masters" in this forum feel uncomfortable with claiming the title. I do feel qualified to speak about funk however, if you'll accept that.

Lots of artists are dissatisfied with their work. I've fiddled and fiddled with scenes, adding another bit until the program bogged down, only to find that I've complicated it and lost the focus of the scene. Sometimes enough is as good as it gets and just pushing won’t buy you anymore.

 

Avoid Deadlines. The monthly challenge is great but it can be frustrating. I found myself pushing other scenes aside for the sake of competing in the community. Now I jump in sometimes and not others. I have scenes like a TARDIS interior that is taking several months. I have a few that are sitting and may never get finished. It’s very liberating to have a few I can actually say, “So What” to. They may never get finished. The pressure I put on my self to finish everything is gone.

 

Sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar. Art is expression. You may be using it as an outlet instead of dealing with something else in your life. Solve that problem and suddenly the art is more meaningful even if the skill level hasn’t changed.

 

Back to the Basics. You can’t go to art school but it would probably be easy to spend 5 minutes a week on a beginner course. I grew up with a kit called “John Nagy Learn to Draw.” It covered the basics starting with shading on simple cubes, cones, and spheres. Michaels or AC Moore will probably have some kind of basic instruction set.

 

I’ve had lots of Bryce scenes where the sunset sky was great but everything on the ground was bright green. Learning what the shadow, sky dome, and fog color do to a scene is as important as the model complexity. Instead of going for the big nebula, try playing with a simple grey cube for a while.

 

Do what you haven’t done. I see lots of straight forward shots and a few looking down in your gallery. Have you ever tried pointing the camera up? You don’t use a lot of characters. DAZ studio is free. Maybe do a crowd of people or a city scene with hundreds. How about a man parachuting from one of those planes with the camera tilted and no ground visible. Maybe dig out Glacier Gorge and put the camera right on the slope and a man on skis haulin it down the mountain. A lot of your images are way back, voyeuristic, almost telephoto. You participate less humanly in your renders from a little in “Victoria Falls” to almost none now. Getting up close in an image to a character adds a lot of emotional punch to the piece. If you commit to being closer you can expect more feeling in return from your work.