dippin' dots

so i played around with photoshop elements today. did what i could with it. first i laid down a flat skin tone for the girl in blue. i tried to render the skin but kept failing. even tried opening it up in corel painter essentials but it was more of the same. so i left it to what u see now. i'll still work on it. just need pointers on how to render skin. hint. hint. funny thing happened after i laid down the color. when i made the photograph that i traced her from visible again, since the opacity was so low, she looked like she got a really nice tan. i actually made someone look better. afterwards i tried my hands at several photoshop tutorials. one of which worked. the first one was an attempt at rendering wood. failed. the second one was an attempt at making a starry sky. failed. the third one i took a different route. when looking up tutorials, i looked up ones that were done using photoshop elements rather than cs3 or 4. and that's when i found the tutorial for dots. while looking at some of the more recent covers of the comic book "runaways" i noticed christina strain uses the dots filter quite often. i always wondered how that could be pulled off. so when i saw the tutorial, i jumped at the opportunity. the instructions asked for a photograph so i pulled out one of my female reference pics. after the tutorial, i noticed the pic seemed a little incomplete so i played around with the different blending modes for each layer till i got what u see now. i think it was a good exercise and though i would not likely make another pic like this again, unless it's a practice, i still think the technique can be put towards other things such as what christina strain does. i also thought it was fun and hopefully i can utilize it in something else one of these days. lemme know what ya think!