Ewww, sharpen and unsharp mask have always been enough for me. Haven't even heard about those techniques. .n

Sorry to hear about your friend Michelle. He sees beautiful dreams now. .n

Jordy, I'll put that behind my ear. When suitable image comes along, I'll try to remember.. And yes, sometimes I use overlay, sometimes other layer styles, fully depends on image and how strong effect I want to create. .n

Jack(and others who are gonna give a shot), try something simple first. Attach two objects together and start there. It took about two years to develop this style where I am now, and still it's usually pain to get things work like I want. 'chelle dear, I think it's more useful to use this thread. All needed information can be found, like link in bug pic and detail image etc. And besides of that, I'm really(with capital r) lazy to write articles. Is it ok like this? .n

LOL ;o)) .n

"Yes, Renderosity has my permission to use my artwork from my art gallery for promotional use only". And if moderators want better quality jpg's, mail or message for me will do the trick. .n

Once a while there's somebody posting with different fonts, different colors etc but gladly they get tired to write those html tags after a while. Agreed, it's annoying in long run. .n

Correctomundo Slenko. You said it well, that's why I don't ever use colors in composition stage. Handling both, contrast and color values with multiple layers are simply impossible. Tried many times and failed miserably. .n

Jovan is swetting and feeling hot in tropical paradise and 'chelle is luring men with choco budding in her chest. And I'm sitting and freezing by lil' butt off here at the office, middle of the freaking ice, different side of the freaking globe. There's no God!!!11 Buuhuuhuu. cries sadly ;oP .n

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

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=956819

Top one, with rocks cropped of from right side. .n

Oh, and original width is 2900, so that's about details. .n

Punkster, if I can nitpick, it's actually tundra, literally middle of nowhere. :o) Phrank, original width is 4000pix. Not fitting here. But if you're intrested, I can mail it for you. It's about 500k's. .n