Took longer than I expected, no thanks to TWO, count em' TWO crashes of my 'puter that wiped out my progress. (Once as I was TRYING to save it) but I did take all advice given, what do you think?

Sorry to hear about the compy crashes, ick ick ick.

But yes.... holycrap! Amazing work!

Tell me about it, I had to re-do the farm and the engine. My computer almost made it into the middle of the street outside those nights.....

It might have had something to do with the fact that I kept swapping between the drawing-in-progress and my browser to consult some reference photos (when I decide to draw an EMD GP18 locomotive, I want it to LOOK right) and in the alt-tab motion, I was hitting some button that was causing my computer to try and open a program that was already running, or enable some weird windows shortcut or somethin' and overtaxing the memory into smoldering oblivion.

I got paranoid after that and saved every 4 minutes...

That's remarkably gorgeous.

I'm sure I've forgotten what program you used to create this.

Photoshop Elements, and about 400 blended layers

For an image created form scratch, that really is remarkable.

Low-Tech wrote:Tell me about it, I had to re-do the farm and the engine. My computer almost made it into the middle of the street outside those nights.....

why would your computer go outs-- oh, i see....

anyway, when you do alt-tab, it forces windows to put the contents of the background process into memory and save the foreground process into the background. if you are using memory intensive products and/or processes and do this too quickly too many times, your computer will just give up and die (as you found out). you might try waiting for a count of 30 before switching back, but if you're getting that graphics intensive, it might be best to just print it out instead of switching back and forth...

also, HOLY poopcakes what a great composition! i wish i had even half the talent required to do something so detailed

Or half the patience!
This is swee-eet, LT!