I have a lot of time as I sit and wait for contractors each day. The silver lining is that I am understanding more what the filters and effects can do.
The koi selection is from a much larger image of a huge koi pond. To that I applied pixel bender, oil paint. When I want to simplify images with other filters I find oil paint a good start that blends some of the details that can get magnified with each different filter and make the final image too busy and cluttered. Then I really love Fractalius so I applied a layer of that. Then Nik bicolor user defined, topaz clean, topaz adjust vintage, topaz adjust stylized collection dark night, added a bkgd and then a nik image border. Whew!
The kanji means "abundance".







I love the creative thinking that went into this one - especially the abstract look to the koi. Nice work.
!. This is in Chengdu, China. I was in China in May, 2008 when that huge earthquake hit so my trip certainly did not go as planned. But it was still quite the experience.

