Thanks for viewing -- I'd greatly appreciate your comments. This is really the culmination of all the Photoshop skills I've learned in the past year, except that I forgot about layer masks. I had a very concrete idea of what I wanted to do for a change, although I wish that I had remembered to use masking (instead of erasing) because the transitions between layers would have been much smoother. The result was not quite what I initially envisioned, which was more like an unfinished illustration. However the vision quickly morphed into something a little more subtle and closer to the original photo. My wife doesn't get why I like "messing up" photos in this manner so much, e.g. "What's with the blue leaves, and couldn't you focus it a little better?". Maybe I'm loony, ignorant, or both, but I just find even the best photography boring without effects. I'm very much influenced by fotogSTAN's work, only I like people in my pictures. The marvelous detail suppression he does in his landscapes doesn't work so well with faces -- at least if one wishes to recognise them.