How I did it

Because Lorraine from With a grateful prayer and a thankful heart asked me to share how I did my painting of Duke in photoshop elements I thought I would throw together a semi coherent tutorial.

I'll attempt to show you how I created this picture

I'm using photoshop elements 7 and working with the impressionist brush. I don't know which other versions this is available in. Sorry about that.

Any way, to begin open up the picture you want to use. This will work on any picture you want. Duplicate your layer. The duplicate is the one you will be doing all the work on.

In the tool bar go to your brush tool, right click to bring up the menu and choose the impressionist brush

At the top of your screen choose your brush. All of them will give  you different looks and you can play around to see which one you like the best. I found though that a smaller size brush works the best. Here I chose one of the wet media brushes.

On the duplicate layer just start dabbing around your picture. It's not going to look like much at first but have fun with it. Remember if you don't like what you did control z is your friend :)
When you think you're done go over to the layers pallette and change the blending mode on the duplicate layer to darker color (you can chose a different blending mode if you prefer). 

Now you're done. If you want a stronger effect, just go back over the duplicate layer with the brush and dab around some more until it looks the way you want it.

Not much of a tutorial but I hope someone finds it useful.