Don, yes, I thought of that same thing.

Too bad our challenge pic wasn't the Statue of Liberty. Which would be a good one, btw, Danny... hint hint.
Frank, love the reflection in the river. That walkway does look like it belongs by a river, and you finished it beautifully.
Jeff, I like how your technique looks on the trees...brought out a nice 3-D puffy look!
Danny, yes I did something different in the sketch. I used Trimoon's method, basically, but in the blur/dodge layer step, I did two versions of this procedure then combined them with mixed opacity.
The first was a sharp outline with the normal blur method. For the second, which makes it different, I blurred the top layer using KPT2's gaussian glow, which is a one-step version of something anyone can do with Photoshop: Dupe over original (no inversion) then gaussian blur top layer and set mode to darken and merge.
Problem here is that you already have to set the top layer to color dodge, so how do you also set it to darken? Maybe by fading in edit to darken, while leaving the layer itself in color dodge mode. Don't know if this would give the same result, but seems like it might...
I liked the way the gaussian glow shaded the edges of the building while keeping the edge lines fine. I will use this again for sure. If anyone figures out how to combine the necessary steps above for those who lack KPT2, I'm sure you'll share the info.
Phyllis