Newspaper Collage

My best art definitely comes from mixing handmade art with photos. Continuing with creating collages in PSE, I pasted together a page of colours and text that I had cut from newspapers to use as a background.  Nothing special:

I then took 5 pictures of birds, 'cut' their shapes from the newspaper collage using the clipping mask, placed them on top and changed the colours.  I then did various blending and effects and these are the result:

Man, I had so much fun and then I took the background again and just used it with 1 bird:

Methinks I've only just started using this background......

Further Digital Collage - Ah, better.

I looked at the collage I did previously and thought, hmm, pretty ordinary, not really inspired.  I thought I can do a lot more with this paper collage than I've done - let's go completely different, not use it as a landscape.

So here are the steps I took:

1.  Changed the colour of the original paper collage and turned it upside later
     (actually, I turned it upside later when I did a blend):

2.  Used this texture that I made earlier and combined it using an exclusion blend:

2.  Extracted this flower, manipulated the colours, applied a down bevel effect and added a border on top:

3.  Finally combined everything:

And here's another one using different colours: