well, layout generally means to the way things are layed out and ordered, like in your sig you have the image on the left inside a box, then theres two boxes to the right of it, on the bottom box you have your name and on the top you have 4 small icons
ok... well anyways, to turn a digital photo into an artsy looking type of picture you...
A) Desaturate the layer in mind
B) duplicate that layer
C) Invert the new layer (the copy of the original one)
D) set the copy layer's blending mode to linear dodge
E) final step and very important one at that, add a gaussian blur
heres an example of my turning a picture of vivi from ff9 into something that looks more like it was drawn