Penguins everywhere

So this was our first un-tutorial related assignment: Creating a portrait with a real background, a cartoon character, and a picture of us interacting with that character. Since I really like penguins, I decided I had to do something penuin-related. I chose a photo of Antarctica as my background, and my cartoon characters included the penguins from the movie "Madagascar" and Pengu. My friend Katelynn took a few pictures of me for the final layers. As you can see, I have two interactions with my characters: when I'm sitting on top of the fat one and when I'm hugging the other. I had to erase part of my legs to make it look like I was actually sitting on the shoulders of the first penguin. For the second "me" I had to erase part of my arm. After I finished erasing all the rough edges and fitting everything together, I added drop shadows to make the photo look more realistic and 3-D. I used the burn tool to add darkness so that the shadows would look even more realistic. I really liked this project, but it was hard to start at first because I'm still getting used to photoshop.