Surreal Practice Tutorials

In the desert tutorial, we first started with a simple picture of cracked dirt and we learned how to distort it so that it changes its perspective and make it seem like we are actually looking into it from a far distance. I also learned how to make a drop shadow for the lamp to make it look more realistic. And we used gradients so that the ground would look more saturated.
I think by learning these techniques will help a lot while creating my own surreal art work because I do not use layer masks nor gradient tools as much and they really do make a change on how it looks in the end.