Tape gun over brackets any day. Goodwill boxes are gold.

Kept my 40 layers and just got faster by practicing the actual painting part. Naming layers is a band-aid, you still don't know how shadow and light work, you just wrote it down. Six hours to two sounds less like growth and more like you skipping the thinking step.

Had the same lightbulb moment at a hammer-in last fall, except mine was the air. I was running my hand crank way too fast and blasting the heat right out of the pot. Old timer told me to slow it down and let the fire breathe a bit instead of forcing it. Made a cave shape with the green coal piled around the sides and it was like someone flipped a switch. Went from orange to that nice lemon yellow in the same fire, same coal, nothing else changed. Blew my mind how much of it is just fire shape and air, not the fuel itself.