How to make part of a curve or brush behind a photo?

[martins]

I always struggle to make brushes, or part of curve elements to be behind other elements or photos.

For example:

 

Is there an easy way or recommended way for achieving that?

[NotMyFault]

What is the difficult part for you?

• Creating the mask for the woman / hat?
• arranging the layers in the proper sequence in the layer stack?
• If you have the lady already masked, copy that layer, and part it roughly into upper / lower. The upper part on top in stack, the lower part below the rainbow.

creating mask ist not easy, and best method depends on context.

[firstdefence]

what about this method 

Simply select the areas of a person or object that you need to be in front of a brush stroke and then copy/paste them above the brushstroke to mask the brushstroke giving the illusion of 3D. 

Edited May 20, 2022 by firstdefence
This explanation was amended because of Alfred being eagle-eyed lol!

[martins]

That's it!

I was trying to use the intersection tool and that stuff. I think when I moved from Designer to Publisher I completely forgot about masks.

Thanks for that. 🙏

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

Simply selecting the areas of a person or object that you need to be in front of a brush stroke...

For later visitors to this thread, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that simply selecting those areas isn’t sufficient. As shown in the Layers panel in the screenshot, you need to duplicate them, too: the duplicates need to be on top of the brush stroke in the layer stack.