Castle doodle
 

PS7 with a reference photo, not sure about how long it took, but I didn't bother too much with the details:

http://www.zelaron.com/gear/recast.jpg

I like the colors.

Reference or painting over? Either way, pretty good. Somethings to work on would be keeping your lines... Straight, too squiggly tend to seem very rough, but the way it's presented here isn't too bad. Keep improving.

As always, heh, heh.

Also a suggestion, but this is just my thoughts. The messy dry brushes down the trees really distracted me, you should try using bigger brushes when doing things like those trees :)

PS: I'm getting better at this constructive criticism thing aren't I!

Yea, you're criticism is excellente now.

Strange, I didn't use any dry brushes at all, only soft PS airbrushes. Of course, the original image size was 3800x4500, so using a relatively small (50 px or so) brush would likely make smooth edges quite sharp on a small resolution like this.

And yes, it was good criticism. Oh, and a reference photo was used, no painting over. That's stupid. :)

You may want to refrain from using big image sizes until you can do the detail to actually make it worthwhile. Otherwise it will detract from smaller details.