Ice King still life

Hi all. I am currently focusing on improving my workflow in Photoshop. So I made this (from life):

Perspective correction-- everything's gotta vanish on the same horizon line

1) rough drawing in photoshop
2) pen tool shapes/selections
3) local color
4) first rendering pass
5) second rendering pass/finish.

And now some thoughts, the tldr. I write this because art is hard.

I have to admit, every time I see a great piece I am baffled and ask myself, "How?? Just... how?!" Huge amounts of detail, crisp edges, very good drawing, excellent color handling, juicy ideas....and they make them at warp speed. And then there are so many people out there at this crazy level. And I'm not there with them yet.

So I learned a couple things-- that my workflow is not efficient, and not leaving me space to just work on a piece-- whether it was searching for the layers that I wanted to paint on, edge management, my paintings somehow are always a mess. Everything I brought to the photoshop table I had from working traditionally-- the motor skills and perception part. I've been using photoshop a long time (about 12 years), but, embarrassingly, I've never fully utilized it to my advantage. Traditional process is no longer linear; though it has some things in common, you can go back and forth among different steps in your process.

A couple techniques I leaned cut out lots of time and frustration. I have a crapload more to learn, but I couldn't believe the holes in my knowledge of photoshop which were costing me countless hours. Eg, you can ctrl+click an area on your canvas while in move (v) tool to select that layer. Basic, I know, but whaaa?? I know I sound like an infomercial... so while I'm at it, I recently purchased Alex Negrea's Playstation tutorial.. it's FIVE HOURS... for $15 (whaaaa?) and that helped me out a lot. 
Blahblah and, "Good reference makes good paintings." Didn't Robert Frost say that or something?