Layers and Textures and Brushes, Oh My!

I'm usually not one for a lot of messing with my photos. Other than some contrast or saturation bumping, I usually don't do much "toying" with images. These are things I use in my design stuff all the time, but usually don't incorporate into my photo work. That being said, I've been playing around today with brushes and textures a little.

Armed with some inspiration from Barton Damer at the Gurus Conference as well as a stack of free brushes from Brusheezy, I settled in to playing around.

Here's what I started with; a picture of Courtney I showed you guys a few days ago.



And here's what I ended up with. (full resolution version here)



This is a little "much" for my usual tastes, but I'm trying to expand my boundries. This ended up being about 28 layers, and I'm pretty pleased overall. I'm not crazy about the black gradient on the right hand side, but I've decided to use this image as my desktop for the time being so I've got to have that to give some contrast to the (theoretically) few icons I have on my desktop.

Hope Court likes it, because if not, I'm sure I'll get another of the looks she's giving me in the pic.

EDIT: I got a little carried away and made another, similar image for my second desktop. Here's the end result: