Overlays and More

A Photog Isabelle Lafrance, I've admired for quite sometime for her soft dreamy pictures is doing a "12 Days of Christmas" giveaway where she reveals awesome goodies each day to giveaway. Like today she's got Christmas Overlays. Did I say they are gorgeous ??!! I love the wintery soft holiday feel to them.

If you haven't ever used overlays on your images, you are in for a big surprise. They can totally change the look and feel of a picture ! I started off with this image of Ms Munchkin asleep.

Not too interesting from a detached point of view right ? (Obviously family would still drool over this). Now to add interest, I created a pencil sketch using the line drawing option in PSE 

I then superimposed the line drawn image with the original and chose the overlay blend option. I then reduced the opacity of the pencil sketch layer a bit to where I felt enough of the original image showed through. Finally, I moved this image over Isabelle's Winter sparkles texture. I then added a layer mask to mask out the hard edges of the top layer so the sparkles texture showed through and it felt "blended". That transformed a "snapshot" of Ms Munchkin asleep, into the awesome pic below where it feels like she's dreaming amongst stars

I'd love to see what you come up with using these or other overlays. They are SO gorgeous !