The struggle for the Art...

It's been a hectic time of life(all the way around).   I've been somewhat discouraged of late as I really feel I'm not good enough at the Art.  I guess what I really struggle with is the detail and the composition.  I'm good at programming and I'm ok at modelling, but I really fall down in the art.  Sometimes I just take ten steps backward.  For example look at Bob two posts down.  I came back to this blog and realized he just looks TERRIBLE.   Man, what was I thinking?  So I took another stab at him:

Ok, so now this is slightly better.  Studied the lips, worked the skin shader and the hair and tweaked some.  Man it's tough getting things right and he certainly he has a long way to go.  Recently I've been working on some architectural visualization projects just for fun and they turned out ok, but I really never have time to do them justice.  

I tried to work on my art a little and I entered a weekend competition.  Having written the cloud generator a while back I thought I could do a good job at it and so I created this:

Needless to say I didn't win, the theme was 'above the clouds'.  This competition made me realize that I really need to work on the Art.  I had a fairly good idea, but the execution didn't cut it.  I got lots of comments like 'hate the black eye'  'the shark looks like he's in a T-Pose'  In my defense it was a weekend competition and I didn't have a lot of time to make this, but still, to fail in the art just irks me.  I think I need to study composition more and also muscles int he face.  Technically I can do almost anything I want to in blender, I just can't seem to do anything appealing aesthetically.  Oh well, it's really not in my nature to give up, so I just keep plugging away....