This creation came about when I saw a neat tutorial by Jinny Brown in the Painter Talk forum.
I as usual kind of did my own thing and came up with what I named Watercolor sky, because that was what it orginally was to be. But...I kept playing with it in Painter using pastel brush variants, lifting the layer to a watercolor layer and wetting the paper etc. I used selection and invert selection to keep the sky and ground separate.

I just came back from a trip to China and I think this recalls some of the painting and landscapes I saw there. I kept going but wasn't happy with my tree so I decided to take it into Photoshop Elements 6 and since I had just taught a class on the filter gallery these ideas came to mind.

I used the Craquelure texture filter once and the dry brush repeated three times. Settings were crack spacing 58, crack depth 2 and brightness 8. I then used levels and color curves on it to enhance the painting. Added more canvas, plus a drop shadow for a little more interest and this is what I got.

Probably far from what Jinny had in mind when she so graciouly gave us her tutorial but I had fun with this one.