I came across this wonderful image and would really love to know how the person went about creating the background. No matter what I seem to try I just end up with a jumbled mess and my attempts at google searching for tutorials on the matter end up even worse, just a bunch of scenes with rainbows in the sky. Anyone able to point me in the right direction? I'd really apprecite it! (Yep, I did contact the person who made the image, that was definatly my first step..no word yet..)

Thanks all, I do apprecite it.

Looks like it was done on several layers.
The background is probably just a cloudy sky with his own adjustments.
The birds are probably just bird brushes and maybe the trees as well.
He may have drawn the houses in black and just cropped the window holes and drew some window lines in them...behind which it looks like a later with a fill colour of yellow.
Must say good composition and good idea and probably took the person some time to put it all together.
It would take quite some time to explain this is detail..you would need to know all about layers and adjustments.
Eddie

Get the sky image from Google, select the color orange you like in PS and do Ctrl + U and select the Colorize box and adjust your brightness and saturation.

Oh! Thank you guys for the reply...perhaps that is where I am going wrong..I am trying to do this by hand with brushes, overlays, blurs..ect. It never occured to me to grab a cloudy sky image and play around with filters...thank you both very much. I apprecite it a bunch, I'll give that route a try and see if I can come up with less of a mess then my first attempts laugh. I do apprecite the heads up on this!

Always handy to have some skies handy...shoot a few whem you are out and about.
You could colour the sky as suggested then copy the layer and set the blend mode to multyply or colour burn...if it is too much lower the opacity of that layers...it's fun.
 Get a moon or something from somwhere...crop it out and do the same thing as suggested above and also try what I suggested for the sky.
Also with the sky you could do a Hue/Saturation adjustment and change the hue slider....weird but more fun.
Eddie

noot: you can also make you're one brush from clouds this work also very good .
just put it on 3...4 layers
Look by > Help< it's no big deal to creat this kind of pencils/brushes....have fun.

Hi there!
    Thanks for that reply =)...actually thats what I was initially trying. I was using different variations of cloud brushes on different layers with different oranges, ect. I just ended up messy. I had much better success with finding stock photos and manipulating the coloration.
 
I think I just need to take classes instead of trying to google/tutorial self teach myself Photoshop. Just seems to be the easier route to go. =)