Cyborg Dragon:
The pick and guitar came from previous weekend challenges as I began to say in my top post. The real challenge though was the materials, the lighting, and the render quality.
I tried various light setups, materials, compositional elements, and render settings. The guitar is something very important to me, so I wanted to get this right and do the concept some justice if I could.
At one point I tried a completely different treatment based more on node curve inversions, which I’m glad, in retrospect, I to have abandoned in favor of this final approach, which required more effort.
It was one of those projects where I actually thought it might have been easier to do, and at one point felt it should have been easier to finish based on my experiences, but turned out to be more of a challenge, but in a good way as it turns out.
The paragraph above also parallels the way I approached the guitar when I was younger, thinking it would be and should be easy but then quickly learning how much discipline and sacrifice it would take just to sound decent.
The building up of callouses, something necessary that happens when you play guitar repeatedly (yet painfully when you first start out) is a good analogy to the artistic experience, I think: the instrument almost punishes you, demands you to tame it, care for it, or it can almost eat you alive and leave you feeling confused or angry.
But then you stick with it, and I mean a total full out commitment, and then harness and respect its power, and suddenly the instrument works more with you than against at some point, once you get past all the intial trepidations and musical theory and just get into a good musical vibe.
And that’s when something nearly inexplicable and amazing occurs down the road, after you stay with the instrument through good and bad so long, something like a real freedom, something that can become a seamless integration of mind, muscles, and air in a seamless stream of sound. You become the music, or the music becomes you in a sense.
There are few feelings in this world like that.
For me, Blender is an instrument of a different kind but one that can work and flow and produce creative sensations in much the same way and offer freedom of another order yet.
GmL: Wow, thank you very much for the great feedback! It’s probably one of the images closest to me that I’ve made in a while, so maybe that helped give it that little extra intangible something 
RobertT
Always interesting to hear how people react to my work!