Plantimals: Alligator Strawberry

Alright, this tutorial will be a basic guide on how to create a plantimal, or a combination of an animal and some form of vegetation. After searching the web for some high quality photos, I found this photo of a strawberry from
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Strawberry.jpg

and another high resolution picture of an alligator from http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_02/alligatorL_468x343.jpg .

I picked the middle strawberry to add the head too, but quite obviously the alligator head won’t fit in it alone, so I increased canvas size to 2240x2500 to compensate.

The background is repairable for later. Often it helps to work in two windows, one small and one zoomed, this can be accomplished through the Window>Arrange>New Window menu item. Now, onto the tutorial.

First, place the alligator head onto the strawberry as a new layer, and rotate and resize it to where you want it to be. It helps to lower the layer’s opacity to 60 or so to see what you are doing.
Next, it is time to cut out the alligator head. I like to use the pen tool so I can have exact human precision on the teeth at the end. Towards the nape of the neck, you can use the eraser tool with a soft edge, not all of it will be needed. Also, when cutting, using a feather of 1px often softens everything up a lot.
Once the alligator is cut out, duplicate the layer with the head on it, and control click it to select it all. Hide the original layer, it will be used later. Fill the new alligator head layer with black three times over to eliminate any remnants of alligator. All we want is a silhouette.
First, select the layer with the strawberry on it, and then go to the clone stamp tool. Alt+Click near the bottom of the strawberry. Then, Ctrl+Click the layer with the silhouette to confine where you can paint, and then select the layer itself. Start from the bottom and fill it in with strawberry texture. If the texture runs out, repeat the steps and work at a high location.
It is time to give the alligators mouth some depth, so we are going to remove the top of the strawberry with our friend, the clone tool. Go to the layer the background is on, and duplicate it to get rid of the lock.
Duplicate the alligator head again, and move the new layer to the top. Add a new Layer>Layer Mask to it, and begin to pain out the skin, leaving only the mouth and the eye visible. Also, marking out part of the inside of the mouth might be helpful. Feathering at the edges is helpful.
Finally, duplicate the alligator head layer again, and move it to the top. Change its blend mode to soft light. Complete! A plantimal, with the mixed textures.
To fill in that ugly white gap, you can slowly clone it in to get a nice result, but, seeing that it would take me more time to clone it in than to make the plantimal, I got lazy and scribbled it in. Perhaps I am a lazy artist.