Photoshop: A New form of Art

Hello! Today I'd like to talk about some of the cool things you can do in Photoshop and why many people--myself included, consider it to be artwork.
What I will be discussing today is not the editing of existing photos but the creation of new material all together. Let's take a look at something I did my freshmen year during computer concepts class while I was bored.
This is the base image that I used to create the final image. For the remainder of this article I will be referring to the finished project as a "signature".
Now in order to create the signature I started out by making multiple copies of the same image in different layers and moving the base image as the top layer so it would not be overlapped by anything else. The next thing that was done was the adding of light to the background image as shown here. As you can see, by simply adding some light into the picture their is a drastic difference between the two photos. The next step was to take the other images (I made twelve copies) and use the "blur" tool all over the area of the base image in each of the twelve images. After this was done I simply rotated them into different positions so the finished project would look blended. After this was done I went under blending option and selected a different option for each image except the base image. Here is what it looked like after this was accomplished.
Quite a difference from the original image don't you agree? The editing in itself is now done however, I like to add some text to my work so people can identify the creator, and to fill in some of the more bland areas.

What I did here was use the marquee tool and the magnification tool to create an area for me to use, then use the paint tool in order to create the line itself. After this was finished I simply used the eraser tool to delete the excess line (make sure that the line is your top layer or you will delete your previous work).
If you look close enough you can see my signature in the work you just have to know what your looking for.
Below I created a quick video showing the different layers and the creation of a line. It also shows the difference between having the background on and disabling it.
Nick. T