First attempt at Painting, and a Black Art thing

I've been gone a while b/c of school and Gears of War :D , but also been really busy in Photoshop, and I've finally finished my first painting image (practiced on parts of others, it's my first whole image). I selected the image, put lots of layers over it, and used a brush to brush in color on different layers that corresponded with the original image. Then, after a lot of extra detail-brushing and merging of layers, color/levels adjusting, etc., on a diff. layer, and I used a lot of smudging to make it look like brush strokes. I also smudged in some white in the hair and some other places to give it more detail. I don't remember how many hours this whole thing took me, but it was close to forever ;). I spent a lot of time getting details in, and then I added a canvas texture once I was done. I did this without a tablet (don't have one yet, but I'm getting one for Christmas) so that would have helped immensely. Here's the painting: http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/3...inting1dc6.jpg
Original

And the black art thing was easy. I duplicated the original twice, then deleted the original layer. On the first duplicated layer, I applied my own filter, and on the layer above it, I changed the mode to Color.
Black art:
http://img464.imageshack.us/img464/9...settreejl3.jpg
Original

You need to learn to blend, my technique which i worked out, was to block in the colours using full opac, and a hard brush, then get a 30opac hard brush, and select colours bordering each other, and blend them using a line, then reblend etc.

Then you blend again with a soft brush. This helps to get smooth finishes, which are needed in this case because your painting looks like the woman is 30-40, when shes about 20-25

I purposefully wanted my brush strokes to stand out, but I guess I kinda over-did it.

any other c&c?

umm it just looks like you took the original photo and just took a smudge tool and smudged it to look like you did that. and the tree just looks like you applied a simple filter to it.