Oh, don't worry-- I wasn't planning on stealing your secrets! I was just curious.
Personally... I was doing everything with GIMP and made heavy use of the Filters menu to generate cool looking wallpapers and stuff. They looked neat, but never anything like real "art", you know?
But that was all years ago when I was unsure whether I wanted to pursue my creative side or programming. I like to leave the artwork to the experts these days. My left brain won the struggle :)
I can always tell when someone is trying to pass off a push button effect as art. All they really need to do is tell people that it's an altered PHOTO, but for some reason I guess they don't think there's a market for that. There is though. Oh well. Their loss.