Brush Composition

The first thing I did to create my brush composition was trace the pen tool around the photo of the man. Next I used the quick selection tool and went to refine edge tool to crop out the hair of the man and move him on to a new background. The background color I used was mostly grey, but had a tint of purple. Next, I copied an pasted the image of the forest that I found on the internet into my photo. I faded the opacity to 40% in order to give the image a more mysterious, foggy feel. Then, I used the image of the green sky and pasted it into my photo. I used the eraser tool to get what I wanted to use out of the image. I changed the blending mode and made the image lighter and changed the saturation to make the image a lighter grey color. The image of the sky ended up being the fog that is at the bottom of my photo. I created a new layer and used a soft round brush to add in the dark purple color at the top right corner of the image. Next I used a gradient tool to spread the purple color through the rest of the image while fading it down. After this step, I used a polygonal lasso tool to create the triangle around his head. I also used the brush tool to get the triangle to be a lighter color. I then created another layer and used the brush tool  to add the leaves to my image. Lastly, I used the stardust image and copied and pasted it into my image. I repeated the steps I used to get the fog into my image. I then changed the levels of the photo to make some of the colors stand out. In total, I used fourteen layers to create this image. The most difficult step for me was getting the leaves to look right in my photo. I changed multiple different levels in the brush options menu and scatted the leaves as best I could.