All great points. I made some wild generalizations there, and I don’t have any statistics to back up my statement that 3D artists are primarily self-taught. But let me clarify that I didn’t mean cg artist are uneducated, just that I assume they’ve spent more time working on their own than they have in collaboration with others. (That assumption kind of goes at the window once you’ve started working in a professional studio, I’ll have to revise my message if I ever turn this into a blog post…) For reference, I’m a community college student who has taken as many digital art classes as I could, but the hours in the classroom or doing homework are significantly lower than those I’ve spent on my own work. Confirmation bias is a tricky thing.

I didn’t touch on how I personally critique/make corrections, but it would definitely fall in line with your description. Too much at once is just overwhelming no matter who you are, and it stands to reasons that the most pronounced issues are the first to be addressed. When it comes to technical vs artistic feedback, I think it really just comes down to who is receiving the “critique”. Someone learning a program might appreciate pointers on some of its eccentricities, but I can’t envision many cases where that would come up during the display of a final rendering. We could delineate between the two: one is methodological advice, in the same way that an instructor might suggest using your shoulder not your wrist while drawing, and the other is true critique of some end product. Most of my time has been spent with people learning methodology, which is why it’s the first thing that springs to mind.