I feel flattered you took the time to write that response. I need to study it. Thank you very much!
I've used PSP for a couple of decades now to tweak photographs, and my computer generated fractal artwork, but it's all been on a single layer. I'm just venturing out in using layers gradients, masks, and all these other things in the past year. So nearly all the stuff that were learning in these workshops is brand-new to me. I think the reason why my projects look as good as they do is because I have a good sense of color, I'm very creative in a lot of ways, as well as being really good with computers. The ideas just come to me and I figure out ways of getting done what I pictured in my mind. I'm sure that I'm doing many things the hard way!