Drawing realistic shoelaces – Photoshop exercise

Photoshop is really amazing. I followed an online tutorial to create photorealistic shoelaces, using just the pen tool, brushes, textures and layer effects. Although the difficulty level was rated as “beginner” with an estimated completion time of one hour, I took at least four hours doing this. I also could not follow a few of the instructions exactly, and used some unorthodox methods to get around them. I need more practice.