I admit, this isn't my style....at all. I'm planning to use it as a birthday card for a much younger cousin that will most likely adore it though.
I wanted to try a fractal collage and thought this contest was a good opportunity, because the description said this: "I want everyone to pull out ALL the stops. I want to see masking, reverse masking, double masking, texturing and more texturing, extreme gradient control, lighting, layering, and transforms the likes of which I've never seen before!"
In total I used 58 layers, 23 of them are masks. I used reverse masking, double (and triple in some places) masking, with a lot of use of the alpha channel, lots of work on gradients, lots and lots of textures on each little individual bit of the image, lighting, mapping, everything. Tha hardest parts were getting the rainbow to overlap the top part of the clouds while having it lie under the lower part of the main cloud layer (I'm proud of that bit, it was really hard ), and the tree. There are 5 different layers making up the tree structure (tweaked formula on each one) and each one had to have the texture applied to it separately. So a ton of work went into this, and I learned a lot from making it.
Because I used so many advanced techniques I think it would make a good demo for people who are really new to the program and want to see some of that stuff in action. The best way to learn it is by example, in my opinion.
it's terrific!