Weeks pass continued

I forgot to mention that my C drive collapsed between all of this, rendering me quite helpless and panicked for quite a bit. I'm running windows off a cd at the moment, and backed all my things up on a different drive. Just in time, as it turned out, since windows at the moment does not agree with;
a) photoshop
b) music
c) internet
d) ventrilo
e) games

Since I have mostly at least two of these on at the same time, quite some files have become corrupted or just lost because I would be in an amazing drawing flow and going all nuts on a drawing and didn't want to save every 5 minutes. It's bit me in the ass, though, since I've only managed to salvage a tiny tiny portion of what I've drawn.

This is a small one, more a thumbnail practice, really.











And here comes the really, really strange part. The last file I'd been working on before the whole crash became so corrupted that I've been unable to work on it since. It doesn't matter how heavy the file, photoshop on it's own can handle it, albeit with a bit of oompf in there. But this file.... this file crashes everything. Music stutters, internet shuts down, photoshop shuts down.. No matter how small in size or file I make it, it'll crash down everything around it. By now it's been nicknamed the Cursed File by my friends, and I can hardly do a brushstroke untill everything comes to a standstill. It won't fully crash photoshop on just painting, but when one stroke takes at least a few seconds to be actually put down on the canvas, it's not really helping either.

Well, here it is. I was quite proud of it, and it was a wonderful journey to get to it and it was all set to go through the utter last stage of rendering untill it all went to hell.

This first stage, just about 20 minutes in. I can't honestly tell you why I did things.

























And this is where I ended..

The dinosaur had a master next to him, but he was lost in the crash. The sky is unfinished, and unfortunately the outlines of the molten metal gargoyles are still visible, because I was trying those out, and many other things aren't clean or clear yet. One thing was finished however, and I'm very happy with how that worked out; the big roof over the street and its lighting/shading. That worked well. Really well. (sorry.. it is quite big)