Brush Stroke- Painting photoshop

As one of the central aspects to Brush Stroke is the paintings that appear in and amongst the plot, it is obvious that we will need some paintings. Due to the fact that we have neither the budget nor the time for professional oil paintings or high quality paintings of any kind I have had to get creative with photoshop. What I did was take some photos (from the internet and in one case from our recce photos) and then I applied an artistic filter, and after this if I wasn't pleased with the outcome I adjusted the other settings like contrast, saturation, hue, etc.
This is how my experiment turned out:

 This was my first attempt and actually one of the best that I did, I think this may be due to the quality of the original photo. This is a very simple application of the angled strokes filter.

In this one I again applied the angled strokes filter but I widened the stroke and upped the saturation when I felt it didn't look 'painting' enough.

 As I knew that late on in the film there would be a painting of a cabin with the two lead characters stood outside I experimented with adding people, in this case it didn't really work, however, I think this is because of the colour contrast between the people and their background.

 This is an attempt at a forest which I thought looked quite good but when I showed my crew they said that it looked too "blocky" so perhaps if I was to used this effect then I may have to reduce the stroke size, it should be noted this wasn't angled strokes.

This photo was taken from a recce at a lake in Sunderland that we are thinking about shooting at, for this one I used angled strokes and lowered the saturation before changing the brightness, contrast and vibrance.

I then added this man in the boat to the painting, he was crudely cut out and quickly edited to have similar aesthetics to the painting. I don't think this looks too bad considering it was a test and when it comes to the real thing I will take much more care over it. I then lowered the brightness to integrate the two images better.