Photoshop Tutorial - Playing in the Sand

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/162976/playing-in-the-sand

I started off with this picture of a beach that i got off the internet.

the point of the tutorial is to be able to add a figure to the beach picture and make it look like a sand sculpture by adjusting the texture and color of the image.

I then found a picture of this statue, cropped the statue out with the magnetic lasso, and pasted it into the beach picture. I used the hue/saturation adjustments to make it closer to the yellow sand of the beach, and also adjusted the background layer to match the statue. 

I got a picture of sand, used the "create clipping mask" function, and changed the blending property to "overlay." I then adjusted the balance, and this is what it looked like.

finally, i blurred and smudged the image a little so that the statue wouldn't stand out as much. I don't think that the picture came out as well as i wanted it to because the statue still doesn't look like it should be part of the picture, but i think i definitely got it to look more sand-like than it did at first. i learned how to use overlay and colorize so it was an interesting learning experience.