February Avatar Competition!

This was my entry avatar, created for the competition organised at Moosey's gardening forum! The theme - avatars that are eye-catching, have a story to tell and that fit the personality of the forum member! Avatar size should not exceed 120 x 120 pixels and must be below 20kb

So, to join in the excitement, I put on my thinking cap, tapped in my creative juices and....woohoo!...this is it!!! Spent almost 4 hours creating and recreating, totally immersed until I was finally satisfied with its result! Such fun time really, to indulge myself like a kid and learning as I progress in this challenging 'game'!

Just like to recap here how I came about this resulting avatar!
Firstly, I rummaged through my archive of garden pics to select something suitable, focusing on these three things - colours? flowers? design? I love vibrant and bright colours, dendrobium orchids top the list of my favourite flowers (as flowers last for months!) and an arching spray of these lovely flowers can be replicated (with a slight edit) to form a favourable design.
I chose this maroonish-pink dendrobium orchid image as it was most ideal. The next step was to crop the pic into a square and reduce its size to 120 x 120 pixels! Then duplicated another 3 more images as shown below, edited slightly (flip horizontal or vertical) with intention to create an oval display of these colourful orchids! All these were done in Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Then, using Adobe Photoshop, each of the 4 images was individually selected with the rectagular marquee tool, copied, pasted and repositioned with the move tool onto the newly created canvas measuring 240 x 240 pixels. The resulting image looked joyful, like a group of happy chorus dances in our garden. But a garden isn't complete without greens and dancing must be accompanied by music! :D Thus, an image of our moss rose amongst its lovely shade of green leaves was added! And to complete the scenario, a couple of 'singing' birds were sourced and downloaded from a free website (reduced its size and edit-flip), copied and pasted into this picture mosaic!

Looked incomplete without framing! And I can't frame it as is with all the segmented layers. So, I used the rectagular marquee tool to select the mosaic as a whole, copy merged and pasted onto a new canvas with its exact size of 240 x 240 pixels. Then the usual works of photo framing were applied and lastly resized the final image to 120 x 120 pixels and kept file size within 20kb (by adjusting the jpeg image quality options) as required. That's it...all done and finished!

Ahem!! Is my avatar eye-catching? Does it tell a story? Does it reflect my personality? Hehe...you decide! :D
Seems so easy now that I've done it, but it was quite tough and challenging initially as some areas were relatively new to me! I've archived here almost all the details, just in case I may find it useful someday...I know it will, as my limited human memory fails me! :D