Jack. lol ...where to begin. Ok, here's the short tut. Well, first of all you need an idea(humm, thats one big and ugly bug, it could almost carry a house in it's back, hmmmm, house in it's back...). Idea, even fuzzy one is the most important thing of all. Then, I choose base image(one with the link), size and dimensions and rough composition(lets put bug here, and house could be there, and here's space for empty space). Next step is start ploughing trough stock photos and figuring wich detail would fit in my idea(gee, that's a fancy chinese house, neat cogs too). Remove colors from all used images, cut and paste, erase and clone till image is constructed roughly. Then starts detailing, erasing and cloning seams off, adjusting shadows and lighs, checking light directions, matching contrasts, drawing details etc. And I use layers, plenty of them. Almost every single detail I do is placed on it's own layer, so I can move, edit or delete anything I want. Shadow layer, lights layer, cog thingies, houses, base of the houses, bug, ground, background etc. Notice, that in this point, whole image has no color. Then starts the fun part. Coloring and texturing. If I want bug to look dirty or background rusty, I simply add transparent dirt or rust photos top of it. I wanted to create scaled look for head and shell of the bug, so I took photos from pavement, adjusted the size and added it top of the bug. You got the idea. Next step is coloring, airbrush is quite nice for that but you can also use photos with nice colors, many layers with different settings for colors. After that, I'm again looking trough whole image and arbrushing some lil details, hide unwanted things with clone, correct shadows with burn/dodge, do final tuning. Doing this, took about 10 hours of continuous work. But this one was quite easy and fast. Normally, it takes something from few days to week. Hope this clears my methods a bit. .n