Hinterland Artsy Transfers # 3, #4 **on sale** http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtsyTransfers-Hinterland.html
Hinterland Artplay Palette (ribbon recolored) http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Hinterland.html
Adventure Word Art Mix No. 1 http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Adventure-WordART-Mix-No.-1.html
Button: Autumn Haze Artplay Palette (recolored) http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Autumn-Haze.html
Artstroke: Autumn Romance Artplay Palette http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Autumn-Romance.html

Notes for Photoshop Elements 14

I created a base that was the shade of brown I wanted by stacking solid papers #1, #3, and #2 on multiply mode, then brought in my picture, a low-resolution grab from Instagram. The rest of the work was filling in the background with the Artsy Transfers, disguising the poor-quality photo, and then creating a line of embellishments, words, and color that would bisect the photo horizontally, to give the layout a bit of a sense of motion.

To reinforce the racing theme, I altered the beads on the Threadz to make it look like my daughter was busting through a finish line at a track and field event.

At the end I took the Hinterland leaf element, made it really big, and dropped it behind the photo and under a few of the AT layersthis had the nice effect of adding texture to the photo and disguising some of its pixelation. I then duplicated the leaf, added a heavy drop shadow, moved it way to the top, and changed the blending mode to color dodge to suggest the theme of running through the leaves.

Because by now the layout had gotten full (I prefer this term to busy), I intensified the drop shadow on all the elements just so they'd pop a little more.