First thing's first: This is my first attempt at a technique that I spotted
rriton use on his image here: https://cgcookie.com/blender/images/landscape-n5/. I wanted to explore the style further, but realized that I was quickly hitting the limitations of my laptop. This was also the first time I had really delved into using vertex weights with a modifier to affect particle/hair length. Very interesting (and tricky) stuff.
Hindsight being 20/20, I realize that I could have sped up my process a bit by baking many of the components. Ultimately, I rendered out a color, AO, and an alpha-channel depth (for fog). Post-processing was done in Photoshop CC rather than Blender's internal system. I chose this route for speed.
All in all, I'm satisfied with the results. I can see myself using this technique again at some point.
