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.

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	FurryForestExample.png 
Views:	585 
Size:	377.0 KB 
ID:	36371

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