NICE WORK!

eye eye eye eye eye! this is cool..lol "cool" meaning it's on fire!..lol meaning THIS IS AWESOME!

Congrats on your first 1st!

Congrats ... I really had fun with this one. Everything was so well hidden it was sooooo hard not to cheat!

Congrats for your second place, Christy!

very nice composition and good blending of different sources...i like the overall mood and giraffe is hard to find...well done

great construction author....gl

Great attitude ... and you have done well with the picture. I have never been able to do these out-of-frame images ... the perspective is always so hard to get right.

Finding the pencil made me laugh, very well hidden = )

Found all; the wooden man was the hardest for me but I didn't look at the cheat sheet! Very good work!

Where's the female bust !? I'm ussually good at this.. oh, found it.

YOU GAVE US A CHEAT SHEET!!!... LOL.. you are so fired!!!

Great job darling.. hehehe.. AWESOME IMAGE!!!

I'm not eager to make future comments on this, cause i don't wanna get you discouraged , so if you like it this way, i won't judge Instead, this is...
What I would do:
1. Make desert opaque, so that the bottom of the frame cannot be seen any more - use plants to cover up where it goes in the ground if blending is not convincing.
2.Make the foreground Daylight and keep the sky in the frame, night time. Instead of that unconvincing green stuff I would search on sxc.hu "desert grass" I"ll find at least 3 usable sources that I can also use for step 1.
3. Make shadows for elephant,maybe tree as well- use displace map if necessary . Fix the cutout of that frame we can stil see white spots in Hi-res.
4.Wait for other comments if I don't agree with Greymval, lol.
Good luck.

Can you make the frame standing in the sand so that we can't see it's lower part? I think it would look better and save you some blending issues.
If you're not sure how it should look, take a small frame, in real life ( you can make one from paper, cardboard, and put it in a bowl of sugar, flour or something similar to sand. There you have your reference!

I would suggest you keep this entry on daylight and make some shadows to the animals, frame & tree. GL.

very nice piece author...good luck

This is a very nice use of the source, sweet image. Could use some improvement on removing the background from the tree leaves, tho - here are several tutorials, in fact I've bookmarked it also, at the end of the first one are other examples: http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/blrbps_1jet.htm .

great work congrats!!

Congrats!!

Congrats...

Congrats for your first place, Christy!

Congratulations! Beautiful entry..

Congrats, lovely work

nice clean work with cool perspective...best of luck

Stunning! Love the mood

Great work author...effects are fantastic...best of luck

I got to agree. It's more like a water woman, than a ice woman, IMO.

One of my favorites.... looks real good.... good luck.

Beautiful!

seeing this entry, it just came to my mind that this one could be the winner......no doubt,....or at least one of the best three......

I thought only simple brushes are allowded

I don't get it... It's been 15 minutes I'm staring, I'm sober and i have too many confusing questions.
What's that thing trapping her lengs, and why is it flying? Is she trasparent as well? Why there's no contrast in this image ? And what's that thing trapping her lengs & floating?
Man, I can't wait the sequel!!!!

Wow Can i keep this as a wallpapers..coz its really pretty..!!GL and real high votes from me..

Wow, im impressed ! Great patience and works with that, high marks from me

NO motion needed...and you had a LOT more patience than I did.

no, no! Don't give it motion because then it'll look like a photograph that was taken with a crappy camera, not a good one with fast shutter speed. You did a great job on this. Only one tiny thing though. One seagull on the left is in "front" of the weeds so it seems like it would look a bit bigger if it was that low and that close. I could be wrong though~ it's just how I see it.

just give some motion and its perfect!

Too. Much. Patience.

My mouse would've been a pulp of wires and metal on the floor by the end of it. Nice work

i do like this
and its nice to see the stock photo you used to create it..
you didn't link your brushes though...could you maybe do so?

I agree with MossyB! What's the difference how much effort it took if the end result is great?

I really like this piece. Don't care if you did it in 30 seconds or 3 hours, the final result is visually pleasing to my eye, no matter how much effort it did or did not take to achieve. Very skillful and well done.

Nice result, but without an SBS, it's hard to judge how much effort it took to achieve it.

Lovely ... has an almost sad quality to it.

I love the overall feel of the photo, great color and texturing!

great base photo,..the foundation!

Nice effect! Really cool image! Good Luck!

very nice idea and cool mood and colors but demand a bit more masking...best of luck

great thing...GL

just an opinion...i would crop most of the flower out and focus on the creature...the high resolution is big enough to draw the attention to the creature

Very good blend, and very realistic looking creature. Well done !

Good blend.