Learned this week in Blender: the skin modifier, objects/groups in place of hair particles, the ctrl+shift+o shortcut and data removal, vertex painting, "connected" proportional editing and limited dissolve.
Jumped back into the internal engine to get this render out for the first page of chapter 9. I'd like to get better at building sets inside of Blender, so there's less to paint when I bring the panels into Manga Studio. This is a decent attempt, so I'll keep trying.