Impressive! It looks really good, am new to blender and still haven’t reached this skill level, I’d love to know where you learned how to model this good!
I started with such a bland attempt at making a french fry cup one night and just decided to see what I could do with blender after using studio for years! – I used some resources to learn how to get the basics down (lots of posts, rarely some videos), then I went off by myself to create my own objects.
Just keep at it, and try new things. – Personally, I would say stick to a single thing until you make it turn out how you would like it too! (Doing multiple things may confuse you if you aren’t too familiar with the program)
As you can tell… there is no visible difference! However, the actual difference is that auto smooth does not cause a split in the geometry. This means you can save yourself a lot of verts and messy topology in case you wanna make any edits or export it out in the future.
You can enable it here: (Versions 2.8≥)
(Versions 2.7≤)
With that small note aside, great work! It looks lovely.