Arsheesh, I just wanted to say thanks. Since your last response to my questions I've spent quite literally hours playing with your tutorial and I have finally! achieved results I'm almost happy with (yeah, we all know the artist always sees the flaws). My biggest stumbling block was one of scale. I'm working with a canvas 2400x3200 @ 300 dpi. At that scale I simply couldn't manage to scale the Clouds Noise filter in a manner that didn't result in a flat looking forest. I know you alluded that was possible but I haven't figured out how to do so yet. I finally gave up and started playing with the Felimage Noise filter. It took a long time experimenting with various settings (keep a text file of notes!) but I finally worked out the settings. With the basis finally in place I was able to apply your notes on individual trees and multiple color layers and found results that are almost respectable.

FurryForestExample.png

Thank you for all your assistance and patience, Arsheesh. I'm truly grateful.