PhotoProject :: Spicing up a panorama as a collage

I like the sweeping vista of the beach at Venus Bay, and regularly take a series of adjoining photos in portrait orientation so that I can create an autostitched panorama. This is all well and good and I have a great series of panoramas of the beach in many guises.
However I wanted to emphasize the clouds and sweeping vista, so my first thought was to experiment with Corel Painter Essentials and found a loose wet on wet watercolour approach, using a watercolour colour palette of colours, some autopaint followed by a few manual round brush strokes to highlight key items like the clouds and waves. This looks more exciting but lacks detail So next I decided to combine this “painterly” representation with the original series in a hockney “joiner” style collage. This is easy in Picasa, I just used the picture pile format and used my “painting” as the background and moved the images around angling them and/or resizing each to help emphasis the space and a final image that is a lot stronger in conveying what I wanted.