I took a picture of a Foxglove I have blooming in my yard. Three layers of original copied. Ran the sketch effect on top layer. Overlay hard light over the second layer filtered with smudge stick and set to hard light. Background darkened with curves so much that everything but the flowers was black.

Larger version had more detail than you can see here, but I thought it looked like colored pencil, maybe. Trying things on pictures I have in an attempt to find suitable subject matter and various effects for the proposed venture of doing this sort of thing for other people (in exchange for their money!)
:wavey:

Very nice results. Really like the subtle blend of foreground color with muted background colors...

If I understood your description the final layer stack looks something like...
1. Copy of BG layer; sketch effect applied, blend = hard light
2. Copy of BG layer; smudge stick filter applied, blend = hard light
3. Copy of BG layer; curves applied, blend=normal.
4. Background (turned off).

Questions
* For the benefit of others, is this the sketch effect (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2640) you're referring to?
If so, did you merge the two resulting layers?

Thanks for sharing your technique... Keep us posted as the $ starts rolling in! :)

~DannyR~

That's beautiful. I love the violets and blues of the flower bells against the muted greens of the leaves. It just pops off the page at you and the details really stand out even though it's not high contrast. Excellent work.
DJ

Originally posted by DannyRaphael

* For the top (merged?) sketch layer, I'm not sure which blend mode you used: Overlay or Hard Light?

~DannyR~

Hard light for both layers. And yes, that is the sketch effect, only I used an action that I got from Adobe's Action Exchange (which is the same as that post you referred to except you just hit play) and the last action step is indeed to merge layers.

Sorry I was unclear...:depressed
:wavey: