Quote - I'm awed by the quality of CG half a billion dollars and an army of artists can produce. It doesn't inspire me to recreate Pandora on my desktop, though. 

Me too, but there's a trick I used in learning photography that also worked for me in 3D. You buy a cheap book of postcards and then try to recreate each picture. As you study each individual picture you get a chance to think why the picture was composed in that fashion, why the lens was set to that particular aperture, and so on. I have no training in traditional art but I get the impression that copying great paintings is part of that learning.