Photo layering

I have been playing yet again! I was busy recording tutorials for a workshop to be held on Wednesday when I managed to get distracted! Every day I enjoy reading the posts from DPS and sometimes becoming "inspired" to try one of the suggestions. The simple tutorials I had been recording led me from one topic to another and thanks to that Photography site, I started to think of textures and layering.
I am not sure if my "pupils" would appreciate this sort of manipulation so I am sharing it with anyone who visits my blog instead!
I started out with a blank canvas and using one of the bog-standard weird Photoshop brushes that I had never used before - it looks a bit like a dirty smudge - I made the brush huge and with two dabs created an interesting "background". Then I "colorised" it in Hue and Saturation and then textured it with a very large and deep canvas texture from filters. I created a soft vignette using the Lens Correction filter and came up with this.

Having a texture meant I needed a photo! I dug one out of my collection, it was a rather pleasant, quiet photo of an Australian pelican on the edge of the water. The texture was overlayed and all sorts of blending modes and opacities were tried. When I settled on one combination I liked I then used a mask to clean the texture from the bird.
So far so good - but not really as inspiring as I thought it could have been. What about some text?
Googled "Australian Pelican" and on a scrap of paper wrote down what was written on the site I opened.

I played around with the colour of the text and placed it over the image making it cover the entire picture. This time I used the Multiply opacity.
 Once again I erased the layer from the bird and this is what I ended up with.

I quite enjoyed experimenting but I am not sure if this example is dramatic enough. I shall have another go with a different texture and photo and see what I can come up with!
AJ