Experiments with brushes

I recently found a tutorial that had some elements that I wanted to use for a couple of photos that I wanted to edit in specific ways. While not entirely ideal this is a rough copy which was just used as an experiment to get comfortable with this technique.
The technique used is outlined here.





 Edit: Here are some more experiments with different brushes

Resume

So I felt that my current resume was too full of useless junk that didn't really matter and which I couldn't really use and that it was extremely bland and not eye catching at all.
I decided to redesign it, in a graphical sense, because it will make it more eye catching, have less useless information to read through to get to the important bits and hence give me more of an edge for getting a job.

A friend gave me a photo

One of my friends gave me a photo the other day and asked whether it would be of any use for my blog as she knew that I was creating one. I said "Ok I'll see what I can do with it". Lo and behold that night I'm unable to create anything that I'm really happy with at all. Nothing I do seems to make any sense with relevance to the result that I want to produce.
It just didn't work.
I went to bed dissatisfied and rather unhappy that I couldn't do anything with the (admittedly) great angle that the photo had.
About a week later I'm folding through some resources (textures, bumpmaps, fonts etc.) and I come across one that I know I need for something, so I sift through my folder of unfinished projects and random spare stock images, and find the extracted photo of my friend. About 2 hours later I had a project that used the image that I was asked that I was happy with:

Here is the source photo that she gave me to use: