Sea Dancing

I had a brainfart, and it was good.
Thanks to the people who have tossed tips and tricks, and constructive critisism, a door in my brain blew open with the brainular flatulance. Seriously, I could cry.

I cannot begin to tell you how much of a pain in the ass this piece was, but every time I wanted to give up, I bore down until my brain tooted some more, and pushed on. It is now 4 am, so I spent a total of 8 hours on this baby, and I could not look away. Everything was painstakingly placed but unplanned. I started out with just a background, and a model, and on I went. I cannot say how many layers there were, but they were in the double digits. Blending was the biggest challenge for this piece, but somehow I found the combonation of filtering and penning that fuzed the elements together and all of a sudden, it was something I had never done before and so beautiful to me that I was like, "Where the hell did this come from?"

But yes, I applied ALL of my knowledge, from the things I have taught myself over the past 13 years, to the things that people pointed out. So THANK YOU to those of you who have helped me out because you made it possible for the mushroom cloud go off in my head.

The Model: :thumb177139434:
The Tail Pt 1 (the main body): :thumb40106799:
The Tail Pt 2 (the skirt like fin): :thumb70036025:
The Background: :thumb148800073:
The Hair Brush: :thumb13166658:

The bubbles were a picture tube in paint shop pro, one of the defaults. The swirls were from the texture explorer filter in kpt3. I used mostly Xeroset filters, and CS Photo Filter. I used the dodge tool, the sharpen, the soften, I played with lighting and tried to put as many different types and degrees of texture, and I worked on composition.

Please do give some constructive critique, I love to expand my knowledge!