The making of Gone Fishin, step by step...

Drew out the body with pen tool and filled it with white.

Added inner shadow, color overlay, gradient overlay, and pattern overlay

Drew out the whisker with the pen tool, then duplicated it and resized it to make all the other whiskers and filled them in with different colors.

Added inner shadow, color overlay, gradient overlay, and pattern overlay to each one.

Drew out the fins with pen tool, filled them in with different colors, and set the opacity a little lower.

Added drop shadow, inner shadow, color overlay, and gradient overlay to both fins.

Simply drew the “scales” with the freeform pen tool, added a stroke to it, and gave them a bevel and emboss.

Did the same with the gills and mouth, but did not add a bevel and emboss to the mouth.

Simply drew the eye out with the ellipse tool, as well as the pupil, filled them in, merged them, and added a gradient stroke around it and the little spot of light.

The background was made using a gradient, then adding a pattern overlay, gradient overlay, and bevel and emboss with texture.

The foreground is simply the background duplicated and moved to the top of the layers with the blend mode set at soft light, and the opacity at 75%. I also removed the bevel and emboss.

The fish I made on a separate document using the pen tool and making it a brush. Then I used the brush on my “catfish document” and added layer effects to the ones in the foreground, and just set the blend mode to multiply on the ones in the background.