Digital Image: Tree in Winter

I am like that tree. Fresh out of leaves, fresh out of ideas.
Purely photoshop work.
I browsed my collection of photos and found a few images with trees in them. This one was the easiest to trace. Other trees had leaves.

I used polygonal lasso to trace the edges, then filled it with gradient. With selection still active, I filled a new layer with white, then another layer with black. I moved the selection a bit to the right and deleted a part of the white paint. Then moved the selection to the left and deleted the black one. Shading and highlight done.

I made the shadow using a layer copy of the tree image, and filled it with black, flipped vertical. From edit menu, I used transformation -> skew, then, well, just skewed it from side to side until I got the shadow position I liked.

Background was done in less than 5 minutes. I filled the bottom layer with black, added a new layer on top of it and paint the ground using soft edge brush.
I made the snow also with soft edge brush but added scatter and jitters (size and opacity) on brush preset menu.
Done.