@lostclimate - thanks for the detailed feedback. Good points. I'll rework the textures -or maybe I'll just start again. I made the mistake of introducing color early and I think too much of the detail was in the color layers. I think I am going to practice in grayscale for a while until it pops then I'll work on color. Otherwise I'm jumping back and forth too much and missing some basics.

@testDummy - hah, sounds about right though the phone was a failure. I was trying to recreate a steel military phone I saw on the net. Of course I did it in another file, then the sizes didn't match and when I resized it here it looked wonky. My efforts to fix it just 'melted the phone' so that was a total waste of time. I added a link on my sites link pages/reference to the phone site by the way. Cool old, vintage and classic phones with images big enough to provide some reference.