Wow...Project 2

Here is my image.  I had a lot of trouble this week.  I made this little image here early on in the project phase.  And then ran into issues when trying to export as jpeg.  When I was exporting into jpeg,the water wasn't showing up, the waves did, but not the water, when I exported into PNG, the waves, water and sand color all were missing.  When exported into SWF, the waves showed up, the color showed up...no water.  I was frustrated, so I set flash up on another computer, thinking that maybe my netbook with Windows Home was the issue.  So I set it up on my Dual-Core desktop with 4gb of ram and started everything over.  That was Friday.  As you can see...it is Monday.  I spent the better part of last night re doing my whole project.  And this time the colors did come in.  I am not sure what I did differently or if I can recreate this image.  But here is what I used:
The building is my primitive drawing, the windows are my merge objects, and the sun my object.  I drew the palm trees and the people with my mouse with the pencil, and I used the pen tool to make anchor points on the water.  The water itself is a drawing object, I used the rectangle tool.  I have the waves on a mask, and the water as the main mask.  The water was not hidden when I exported.  For the sand I used the spray paint tool, and spray painted some black dots.  I have the building, people and the sand and trees and the sun on an objects layer, and then the objects folder holds the water and water mask, and the objects layer, then the backround is it's own layer.
1) the group objects serve as an easy way to edit the layer without making changes to a particular layer.  This makes things easier I think.
2) My final order was selected to make editing the things easier.  It was a relatively simple drawing, so it didn't require a lot of layers, but having it in layers did make things easier.
3) I think that if you have to manage items on a single layer, then keeping track of what items are is helpful.  A pitfall I can see would be making improper object types, like a merge instead of a drawing, or a primitive.

This week was frustrating because of the export issues.  But it was a learning experience.  I just don't know why the water wouldn't export, it was probably something small...but I don't know.  And I am now pretty late.