Collages and Montages

Mandalas

Mandalas have long been a fascination of mine. For almost five years, I've been playing with this concept. At left, is "Beach Brunette" which does indeed begin with a photograph, mangled beyond all recognition though it may be. It was done several years ago, before I learned from Janee the value of keeping notes (in "Blank Canvas") and, in this class, a very clever way of doing so — in the layer names.

Below are several which are not nearly as representational in origin.Top left is "Little Flower". Top right is "The Mysterious Red Ring". At the bottom is "The Mysterious Light of the Star".

Well, things have now gotten completely out of hand here.

First of all, I stole the young lady's photograph from smookin's collection 2004 at pbase.com, picture red24.jpg to be exact , I'm claiming the "fair use" of the Copyright Law here. Were I not using this for an academic exercise, I would have done all of the following:

Contacted the person known as "smookin"
Emailed him or her the proposed treatment of the photo
Requested permission to use the original image, with an offer of what my company felt to be reasonable compensation
Negotiated about it.

Because I've had stuff stolen, and I know how it feels.

All of this is just putting off the inevitable admission. After I made the halo mandala surrounding the model's head, I have no idea which parts of the experiment made it into the final work. There's the basic photo, Layer adjusted with 11,0.76,103. An additional layer, so that her face wasn't so washed out by that. Finally, the Mandala Halo layer, in Lighten Mode.

Getting the feathering between the halo layer and the background layers was about an hour and a half of playing with Selection and Quick Mask mode and applying various treatments to the Quick Mask mode, returning to selection and deleting until I got the proper amount of fade, then finally Edit > Fade the delete with a Blend Mode which I've forgotten to get the tops of the waves green. They weren't that color in the beginning, but I like them better that way. Sorry. It's almost 2 a.m., and I've been up since 5 a.m. yesterday, but I got caught up. There were a lot of Cntl-Alt-Shift-N and Cntl-Alt-Shift-E operations involved, as well, I can tell you that. At least three.

Then, finally, I reduced the whole deal to 500 px on the long edge and saved for web. I hope the display still shows the model's amazing smile in the halo.

I promise to try to take better notes on the other pieces.

Collage

This is what I am setting out to do. Rather than put together a collage of family portraits and momentos from photographs, I have chosen instead to create a collage in honor of dogs. From a fairly extensive collection of art in electronic format, I have selected 16 paintings which feature, or at least include in an important way, our canine companions. When choosing, I attempted to select works from a large variety of styles and time periods. Included are several classic works by the Dutch masters, Scandinavian and Native American works, a Pre-Raphaelite piece (of course, how could I not?), illustrations, humorous pieces, and several blatantly sentimental paintings.

To provide appropriate attribution on this page would, I think, detract both from the effort of the artists whose work I have borrowed and from the effect which I am trying to accomplish. Therefore, I have created a small gallery page to exhibit those works and credit the painters. It will open in a new browser window.

The task I have set myself is to create a collage which balances these various styles in such a way that the "aaah!" of the art connoisseur is balanced by the grin of the humorist, with a tinge of a tear in the smiling eye. I rarely begin a piece with such a blatant statement of purpose, but there it is.

Please let me know how you think I did.

After selecting the pictures, I then created a brush set, selecting canine-themed brushes from a variety of sources.

Montage

The Children's Hour

Once the Inspiration Fairy smote, this came together fairly quickly. About two hours after selecting the material. Bringing the materials together in a thematic circle, we have, clockwise from upper left, Maxfield Parrish's Sleeping Beauty, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones' Briar Rose (an early version of the story, with darker overtones), Parrish again with Puss and Boots, Parrish yet again with Little Jack Horner and Jack and the Giant, then Jessica Galbreth's Titania (who looks to me like the female version of the Green Man, who could be the evil witch for) Snow White. And NO! that's not Disney's Snow White in the center. It is, in fact, Arthur Rackham's Snow White, done before Walt even dreamed of Mickey, in the early 1900s.

The technique was: bring them all into a huge (3000x3000px) canvas, move them around until the theme is illustrated. On each layer, use a large soft eraser to cut out extraneous parts that don't fit. Cntl-click the layer to select filled pixels, feather the selection about 10% (use the info panel to get dimensions), invert the selection and delete 4 or 5 times. (This didn't always work well, but we'll get to that later.)

Arrange the layers so that things which should be "on top" of one another are. No rules here; it's an "eye thing."

For the border, go to the background and make it a regular layer by cntl-clicking on it, then get a large soft brush, fiddle with the hue brush dynamics and go around and around the picture several times. Then add a hue-saturation adjustment layer above it, pick colorize and make it nice.

If I wanted to spend another couple hours fiddling, here's what I'd change:

Puss and Boots drove me crazy. You still can't really get a good look at Puss, even though I retrieved the original and clone-stamped the cliffs between Puss and the King back in.
Under Snow White's left elbow is a white spot which really shouldn't be there.
There's a problem between the two Jacks (Horner and Jack and the Giant) which I can't define and therefore can't fix. But I'm not pleased.

I do like the way that Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose melded together, and the way that Jack and the Giant and Puss and Boots blended together.

Additional Montage

When I was busy whining that the Inspiration Fairy hadn't smote me, I had forgotten that I was looking, every day, at a montage that I had created. This is a scaled-down version of the desktop on my home machine.

I actually like that the colors from the sky discolor Gollum's face; I really do not like that the only photo I could find of Tom Baker which shows the famous scarf in all its lengthy glory cut off the top of his marvelously curly hair. But what can you do?