Trying out different brushes on the old photoshop

I got in touch with Elsa Chang after coming across her blog http://elsasketch.blogspot.co.uk/ and loving her technique in photoshop, so thought I'd email her and see if she could give me a tip on how to achieve the painterly quality she has. Kindly she replied so I had a dabble this evening! I re-did the gardening princess in one brush. I need to play around still with adding diffrent brushes to one image, but already I can feel how this will improve my circus story :o)