Tulip "Painting"

It took me a while but I turned this:

into this:

• Crop image
• Isolate tulips from background
• Add a solid black fill layer on top
• Clean up by erasing the white pixels that show up after you add the black background
• Apply Filter>Artistic>Watercolour
• Paint in the rainbow and run the smudge tool over it

Then I thought I'd go a little further and this is what happened.

• Apply Filter>Artistic>Dry Brush 10, 1, 1

This looked pretty good but there were a lot of tiny little white dots around the outlines of the tulips and vase, so I zoomed in on them and used the Smudge Tool set on Natural Brushes>Dry Brushes to "smudge" over them.

• Cleanup image by using the Smudge Tool

Why stop at the edges only? I ended up smudging where ever it looked like it needed it, mostly where there were a lot of jagged looking pixels. I felt like I was painting!

The Smudge Tool is my new best friend!