Giraffe Frame Freebie and showing my painting progress

Hi all!
My painting course with the new mixer brushes is very interesting and I'm really in love with them. The first part of the course we had to use a photo as base and painting with the colors of the photo and mixing and blending them to achieve a painting look.
Painting Over a Photograph
The CS5 course with Kirk Nelson at Digital Art Academy you can find here.
This is my brothers little Granddaughter Leticia. I used the picture and followed the steps.
But it was not easy, and my Photoshop also froze and I lost a good part of my work. This was the first time that this happen... may be these brushes and the preview of them is to heavy for my pc.

The Hair was so difficult for me, that I really had to go back and delete everything what I did.
I never did a portrait before, so I used a paint program (dynamic auto painter) to make a sample piece for me and I used this to study the shadows and lightning parts of the face. I also "cheat" a little bit, and used the clone brush to bring the hair and the ball parts in.

The background is from my personal paper/ background action - i used the original colors - and I added it with a soft blending on top of the layers.
Painting your own original Art
In the second part of the course, we had to paint from sketch. We used a pear sketch given to us by our teacher Kirk Nelson. This was really a challenge to learn how these brushes work and here below is my pears painting result:
This was a great exercise, and I love painting the pears.
The detail brush is what I liked most to do in order to give some little enhances to the work!

And I also used one texture blend brush from John Derry's collection (see my further post here at my blog) to add little details.

The canvas is from my personal collection (I did a handmade recycled paper), blended with Kirk's canvas. Thanks for looking!
Here is a collection of some of my preferred canvas that I put in my store at DDR
I also used these brushes to paint a Giraffe!! I loved doing this so much - it is like a therapy - and I'm offering this little mini kit for FREE only for few days at my shop at DDR store.

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See here in YouTube a interesting summary with the 5 fav's features of CS5
Happy Scrappings!

Silke