I figured it out! Hallelujah!!
All those awesome scores inspired me to run a postmortem (
after-the-fact, non-scoring, for research purposes) file to see if I could figure out how they got those incredible scores. I am so glad I did! I learned a lot!!
If my scoring file had been my practice file and my postmortem file had been my scoring file I would have earned 57,412 points off 43,494 simoleans of top 10 large portraits and a total of 32 large portraits painted!
I usually concentrate my for-fun games on gardening, fishing, and cooking and I go for Ambrosia ASAP so I never have really tried to get a painter into megabucks as fast as possible before. I had some very bad painter habits!
Thank you Carl, Pam, Metro, Rachel, Blackrosea, Nutella, MarianT, High Scorers, and everyone else who plays these challenges for inspiring me to learn how to be so much better at this part of the game and for providing such a wonderful group of people to learn from and play with!!