Day 10 A painterly Effect

This week in Kim Klassen's Beyond Layers lesson I've been experimenting. I started off with this photo I took last year of an old wagon. We don't get snow here on the Australian South Coats, so it's hard to get white backgrounds. I found it challenging to play around with this image to see what adding textures and changing hue/saturation does to its feel.

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I turned off the last hue/saturation adjustment layer as it seemed warmer without it. I also added a background layer to lighten the outside edges more. The textures didn't show up much so I increased the opacity. I used the paintbrush to remove some texture as it seemed dull:

Not happy, I turned off the Sienna texture layer. The colours look too bright, I think:

So next I desaturated further, and added a darker texture (Kim's Branded') at 24%:

Next I increased the 'Branded' texture to 71% to try to homogenise the background.

I'm not really sure any of these worked - I like the third one the most. I'd love to know what others would do with this!