My first real photomanipulation!!!

Those of you who have done a lot of these may find mistakes, but I am SO proud of this piece!
I read over 35 tutorials to be able to learn Photoshop and I spent over 60 hours working on it, believe it or not!

As I was adding items, I kept finding problems that I had to solve, like complex shadows and depth. However, I must say it was a delight to work with CS2 and I have learned SO much!

I must thank all the people who uploaded tutorials and specially my son, who was patient with me to teach me some basic commands and where to find specific tools that I needed. He was mean enough as to never teach me about the drop shadow option (I was using the lasso tool to do ALL shadows, a nightmare, hours and hours of work).
But her girlfriend did which allowed me to finish this work tonight. And my son said: "Mom, if I had taught you the short ways to do things, you wouldn't have learned as much as you did!" (I have to agree with him!!).

I started with the background, then added the face with the fairy (the small fairy was flipped horizontally and I had to fix one of the wings, which had an end missing). Then I added the bushes to the sides.
The lady's hair color was changed and highlighted, and the little fairy has different shadows (done with the lasso tool and hours of frustration, because I know NOTHING about perspective!, but I learned so much!). I also painted the lady's eyes with brushes and used candle brushes and a stock candle. Both the lady and the fairy have tiaras and a diamond (kind of) was made with a brush on the fairy's tiara. And the last touch was the fairy dust, since I wanted to show that the small fairy came flying to the lady's shoulder.

I wanted to surprise you all and I hope I will! Who know what I will come up with next ? This is a whole new world!

Please feel free to comment and critique. I am so eager to improve and do nice things

So, here's what I used:

Background - [link] by

Background trees - Night Swimming (my own) [link]

Lady's Face - [link] by

Earring - [link] by

Fairy - [link] by

Fairy's Crown - [link] by

Princes' Tiara - [link] by

Background Candle - [link] by

Bruhes:

Foreground Candle and Fairy's Diamond by
Eyeshadow brushes by
Fairy Dust brushes by

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did while working on it!