Am I painting this??

I spent yesterday experimenting with PSE.  I wanted to create one of those weird pictures where reality and picture are mixed up together.  I wanted to give the illusion that I was actually painting the picture so I took a picture of my hand and added it to the picture and converted some of the picture to black and white.  I didn't actually want the hand to look too real - I wanted it to look part of the picture - so I added a black outline and used the cut out filter to make it a bit blocky.

Flowers for Photo Art Friday

I haven't taken part in Photo Art Friday for a while but when I saw it was flowers, I thought I just had to submit a picture as my hubby had taken some great pictures of the flowers in our garden.

So here is my submission:

And here is how I did it.

1. I copied the background layer (ctrl+j for PC or cmd+j for Mac)
2. I then set the foreground colour to #c1a567 and the background to white.
3. With the copy selected, I went to the filter gallery and choose the Stamp under Sketch and changed the Light/Dark balance so that most of the flower and leaves were beige.
4. I then changed the blending mode of this layer to Pin Light and set the opacity to 83%.
5. Pen and ink layer:  I made another copy of the background and went to Filter>Sketch>Pen and Ink.  I put the detail up to 1 with a little width and contrast and put the fill down to zero so that it was just a black outline on white.
6. I then went to the magic wand tool selected a white area and deleted the white.  I set the opacity of this layer to 60%.
7. I brought in the free texture, Sky Love, from Pixel Dust Photo Art and set the blending mode to Color Burn and the opacity to 72%.  I put this layer just below the pen and ink layer.
8. Finally I added a levels adjustment layer and lightened the whole image a little.

Andy Skinner's Book of Secrets

Finally finished my 'Book of Secrets' or in this case Box of Secrets.  I see Andy's starting a new course on the 9th August 2013.

Had such fun doing this box and have a couple more in mind....

Also thought it fitted in well with this week's theme of time on Inspiration Avenue.