Very right, it can actually be fun looking for detail and little things others might not notice, but when it's just sort of empty or hasn't had enough time spent on it... there's just nothing much to say, unless the concept or something like that's good enough I'd suppose. ^^;
The up side to looking back on old techniques is that you can at least see what about it has changed and what areas you weren't doing so well on, that can be sort of a reference from then on after for when you start out new techniques, then it gives you something else to focus on and the cycle could repeat itself... though that may not work too well all the time I suppose. x.x

Eep, thank you Tobers. ^^ I was always off with it, until you suggested to try sketching things out first, I'm too slow and probably would still be nowhere if I didn't hear that then. :P I kind of like how they were colored though, it was really unique. Usualy when people start off they make colors all vibrant and too vivid, so it's kind of too much... but your pictures were really soft on the eyes and and had this sort of classic, real life look all because of the colors, thought your shading and all that was good so perhaps it wouldn't have looked as bad being vivid... I still like the color choice back then though. ^^ And your stuff still looks great to this very day, even with brighter colors and changed character designs. :3

Luckily it was only one teacher that actually thought that... but eep, surpise quizzes don't sound too hip, not hip at all... At least you did well and proved them wrong, hurrah for that. =P
Lol, hopefully it'd be early enough to get one of them as a surprise, even if the rest have been in the washer, so that could bring a lot more fun to it. I usually only use mugs for tea and hot coco in the winter (Or summeer, whenever it's around =P) but I guess having personalized mugs would give me an excuse to use them more often. ^^

I actually missed the news about it (And I don't think I saw a hot topic about it in the message center either), and I don't know if there's a way to look back at older news reports, but I did see a notice about using prints when I submitted a couple days ago and that got me a little curious, but I left it alone since I didn't know about it. ^^; Is it like having prints for subscribers or something? I really need to pay for attention for stuff like that. @.@