Don’t jump into detailing

Many students show me their art and when I ask how long they’ve worked on it, their answers vary from 40 to 60 hours. Yet the art isn’t up to the quality you’d expect from that length of time. That’s usually because they spent hours polishing details, without getting the composition and value structure of the lighting right. Always look at the effectiveness of the big picture first, and worry about details later. Quality doesn’t equate to the level of detailing. It depends on your understanding of the whole image.