Beach Walk- Texture Tuesday

Texture Tuesday prompt is free and easy today which I took to mean, what picture this past week was one that I wanted to work some texture into. This beach scene is from last week and I cloned out a guy on the left to leave me with a clear, calming view to the ocean. In the picture above, I added a gradient to the sky to darken the blue and used kk_sotrue texture at 80% hard light while also adding a darkened layer of the picture. It looks like a old picture and I do like the effect.

In the first picture below, I used the paint sketch technique from the tutorial for part sketch, part paint at Oscraps.com. I saw this technique at Earlkdesign.com from last week's Tuesday texture and have been playing with it for the past week with a couple of pictures in this blog post. (Thank you Earl!!)
When I first tried the technique, I did not follow the directions from ozcraps.com, but looked for a specific PSE tutorial which I found at Photoshopelementsuser.com called Turn a photo into a paintery sketch where I am a subscriber. Two different techniques with similar results but the oscraps.com site uses a watercolor brush for the colors and I like the softness of the picture better. In both pictures below, I did use the kk-sotrue texture again from Kimklassen.com and followed the directions for photoshop using PSE10 in the first from Oscraps.com which looks like a dream scene to me. The second photo is done using the directions from Photoshopelementsuser.com. To me, it's all about the scene and learning new techniques for texture Tuesday. Which picture do you like?

Directions from Oscraps.com

Photoshopelementsuser.com tutorial: Turn a photo into a Paintery Sketch