For those of you who read comics, you may be familiar with the great artists' revolution in the late 90s; Image studios et al.

One of the big, noticable things about the new art styles that grew up around that time was that everything, skin, hair, costumes, everything, suddenly became much, much shinier.

I now know why; computerized colouring.

I've been colouring stuff on computer with the GIMP, and really, it's just so very, very easy to make things shiny.

I've managed to get much further in depicting identifiable texture than I ever did with physical media. I've got to the point wherwe I can reliably reproduce leather and satin (shiny!), and I'm making some headway on velvet.

This pleases me.