Practice doesn't work for me, but that's only because I have heavy dysgraphia.
If you don't have an actual issue, you're just not trying hard enough.

http://minus.com/mJEFu8Nq3/

superhires copy of that kag title for those that want it, it 4:3 16:9 and 16:10. 8mb rar.

Nice work on the KAG title screen, spectacular atmosphere in it, I could just hear the cold winds blowing through the alpines and whipping the banner around.

I don't think you guy have seen this yet... Nevertheless, it's safe to say that Lego Star Wars is a big part of my childhood.

Is that from the newer sets of Lego Star Wars or from the older ones?

The new one. The old one was tiny.

I preferred more the old sets. Mainly because the new sets have the human painted in skin color, not lego-yellow.

God, me too. I hate the flick missiles. And the 3D hair. And, just, everything. :/

Yes, they don't look like Legos anymore.

I miss the old legos ¬¬.

; ~ ;

There were a tonne of sets I missed out on too. For a long time I wanted the old series LAAT gunship. It's on eBay now for six hundred dollars :/

Oh god.
I'll begin collecting Legos now, and in 15-20 years they'll cost 10 times more.

No but really, 600 dollars? Good god.

I'm only 15, so yeah that was one of the newer sets that I got when I was probably 11 or so... And I do miss all of the old Legos, the aliens and rock raiders and all the old Star Wars ones. But those were about 7 years older than when I hit the Lego age, they are rarities now! And 600 bucks for plastic? No thanks.

I have that exact model myself. I also have a tri-fighter and some smaller lego star wars bits.

Just a word in advance, I might be posting a lot of my crappy photos here in the next few weeks...

About the practising art to get better: actually I would disagree that the best thing to do is just blindly keep going and state the old quote "knowing is half the battle". Don't think the very first artists were somehow good just because they did a lot of art, no they were shocking, only until people started applying scientific principles to the way they painted and structured things did they start looking good (around the renaissance period IMO).

I think you can get halfway there by having strong technical knowledge (how light works, metallic surfaces, subsurface scattering, anatomy, how objects actually look/good observational skills, having a large visual dictionary etc.), but to become a master artist you need to pump out work and learn the rest through trial and error. But you can never be a good artist if all you know is technicalities, certain things can't just be taught.

Basically you should strive to keep learning new techniques/principles whilst pumping out as much work as possible. (most of the people that I have seen that increase massively in skill are attending university/college)

It is hard to find decent tutorials but James Gurney's "Imaginative Realism" and "Color and Light" are the best books I have seen.
Obviously these tutorials by arne are good too: http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/process.jpg
these videos by feng zhu: http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL cover a lot of areas.
this is a page with the classic pixel art theory by Helm from the Pixelation forums http://www.pixel.schlet.net/
and some other tutorials:
http://www.youtube.com/user/sinixdesign
http://conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=42
http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials

I don't really have any others off hand but I will say this about colours: Full 255 blue, red, green, cyan, yellow, magenta and white are never found in nature, also bright magenta and cyan are very hard colours to come by in nature. If you ever use any of these "pure" colours your images will look garish and just plain bad, you should always used more subdued/natural colours unless you know what you're doing; generally the colour that you think something is will be too bright if you are inexperienced, tone it down a bit. Also grass/foliage usually tends towards yellow yet every noob will always go straight for bright and dark greens, add a hint of yellow to the colour. Last thing: when trying to blend colours across the colour wheel grey will appear as an intermediate rather than a separate 'cluster', thus greying out/desaturating colours is, in some cases, a good blending technique.