PAF: beauty from ugly

Interesting challenge from Bonnie over at Pixel Dust Photo Art this week - take something ugly or that you don't like and see if you can improve it by making it digitally artistic.  Hmmm.....sounds like fun, right?  Well it is, but it's so darn addicting and it's hard to know which ugly photo to choose and when does it become "art".  Here's where I stopped....

Here are the elements I used.

My "ugly" is the image of the wing - it's the plastic wing from a Budweiser eagle that my hubby has hanging in the garage.  I keep trying to find a convenient and clear way to showing what I've done and I kind of like this little snapshot idea - what do you think?  Is it helpful or interesting?  Anyway, I combined 3 photos and Bonnie's Artist texture - you can see the word "artist" on the left side of the wing.  I thought if the words were there, that would make me one! Ha.  I used linear light on the ice at 100% and vivid light on the Christmas lights at 55%; overlay on the texture.  I used layer masks (love those!) on both the lights & ice images.

Then I tried another more......elegant.... treatment of the wing and came up with this:

The base photo here is some fall trees in Montreal, the wing and a texture from Nancy Donaldson and another one (the words) from Skeletal Mess (find him on flickr).

I can't wait to see what others have come up with - are you as addicted to the whole PSE thing as I am?