Today’s experiment is using the oil paint filter in Photoshop CS6:

This filter is very easy to use, with 4 sliders for brush controls and 2 for lighting controls – giving more or less detail to the strokes.  It works well on this photo with simple shapes.  I first tried it on a more complex scene with fairly muddy results, although that one probably would have worked out well if I had applied different settings for the oil paint filter to different parts of the image (the oil paint filter does not directly allow this, so layers and masking would have been needed).