LightSovereign
Hey Marley, that is very kind of you. Thank you mate! 
Try
LOL! You are very kind too. Yeah, I’m very much aware that some of us here are swimming against the tide. There is a certain style - my friends call it the ‘cg society look’ and mine aint it. Hahaha! Never will be! But based on the fantastic number of comments on this thread - it seems to have received the most comments out of all the threads in the challenge - I’ve been made to feel very welcome here and that’s really nice. I’m not disappointed that I didn’t win anything. Far from it. And I thought the winners were a deserving bunch who did great work. But I guess what does disappoint me is the fact that my real heros here, the ones I see taking the big risks and therefore taking the field forward the most in exciting new ways (which other people will then most likely follow), are constantly overlooked and have eventually stopped entering the challenges.
A good jeweler will recognise that each gem is unique, and cut it and polish it in a way that accentuates its strengths. So polishing is an important part of that process, sure, but if you polish everything too much you just end up with a bunch of identical round stones and you kill the very uniqueness that gave that gemstone its real value. Sure they will look faultlessly clean and polished, but they’ll all look the same and probably look like they were all done by the same jeweler. A gem can get too much polishing.
I think it’s like that with other types of art too. For a while, musicians over-produced their recordings and after a while they realised that every bit of pop music sounded the same (many would argue they still do!) People wanted to hear something a bit more raw, even if it meant they heard some faults. So producers pulled back on their production values and I think the music benefited from that. It got back some of that original spark that seemed to happen in a live performance but which got lost in all that production.
I’m hugely impressed by the high standards of work I see around here, but I have no intentions of adopting that same level of polish. Because if I did I know my work would lose the very thing that some people find appealing (which I know is the same thing most people find limiting and annoying about it!)
So I don’t know how long I’ll keep plugging away at my own stuff here. I admit that it can be tiring to swim against the tide. As long as a few other loonies share a similar goal by taking their own personal journeys and risks then I know I’ll continue enjoying myself and continue to get inspiration here. Or maybe I’ll head off somewhere else. I don’t know. But I’m grateful for the fun time I’ve had here and for the generous support and help I’ve had along the way. And the friendships I’ve made too. The friends are the best bit