How I made my 'Free-range Tumbleweed' Image

Why a tumbleweed?
Tumbleweeds bring back fond memories of the adventure of a windy day while growing up in eastern Washington. These relatively harmless creatures would emerge from the nearby fields and frolic across our lawn enjoying their new-found freedoms until the wind stopped or they became ensnared by the local barbed wire fence. However, a few hardy ones kept their independance. Even today, if you look hard enough and know where to go, you might come across one of these rare and endangered free-range tumbleweeds.
	Driving around visiting with my Mom through the nearby countryside of Grandview, Washington, I found this little tumbleweed and tried taking several pictures of it. My original idea was to put it in barbed wire then Photoshop-stamp the wire out of the picture, leaving it hovering. However, it blended in too much with the natural background so I put it on a fence post so it would be highlighted by the blue sky. This way I could easily select just the tumbleweed in Photoshop.
	While driving around, I saw this green field with blue sky and thought the contrast might make a good background for the hovering tumbleweed.
	I selected the tumbleweed, and duplicated it, layering it over itself to make the tumbleweed look fuller, using a layer mask to hide some of the stray weed strands. I positioned the strands going up so it could give a subtle suggestion of hair, or tentacles. I also darkened the bottom of the weed so it would look like the sun was directly overhead.
	I duplicated the tumbleweed, selected it and filled it with black. Then I blurred it and using 'free-transform' I resized it to look flat. I then adjusted the opacity so it would show the weeds underneath and look more like a shadow of the tumbleweed.
	I dragged the weed and shadow into the other background. I like the color version but was initially envisioning a more dramatic black and white image. If I was to turn the whole image into a grayscale at once, it would look too flat. Instead I took each layer and adjusted them using the Channel Mixer in it's monochrome mode. This gave me control of the tonal values of each main element in the image.
	In the case of the sky and ground layer, if I channel mixed the whole layer it would leave the sky nice and contrasty and the ground flat and dark, or vice versa. To independantly adjust the tonal values of the sky and the ground I created a layer mask for the sky then duplicated the layer and made another layer mask for the ground. Then I channel mixed each layer as I saw fit.
	To make it slightly richer, I changed the mode to Duotone and gave it a slightly dark brown tone.