Photomanipulation Exercise I

I picked out a photo I wanted for my Blog profile, and I started off by choosing a picture, a trip I took in the summer to Paris to meet some relatives. So once I decided where I wanted it to go, I isolated myself by using the pen tool to mark a path around myself and turning it to a selection (right click)  and inversing the selection (on the 'select' menu) I put up a tonal gradient to have a different background and then went on Image > Mode > and Grayscale to make myself monochrome (now on step 2) The next step I just carried on with myselection and used different brushes and some colour temperature knowledge to paint some background colours! (step 3) and to the right of the third image, you'll see the various brush types I used for this exercise.