When looking back at all of DeviantArt images I had found an abstract theme was starting to develop. I wanted this first piece to allow my imagination to run so I selected the two images that I knew I wanted to include (gramaphone and ‘say cheese’ girl). I literally started with placing these two images together in the center of the spread, at an angle (in order to start to create a flow for the viewers eye to follow). To give the elements a different feel I used differing adjustments layers masked to the objects to change the look and feel to be a little bit cooler.
I laid down a cream background but it seemed to be a little bland so I placed to ‘old paper’ textures and used a mixture of an ‘overlay’ blending mode and layer oppacity to make it blend with the block cream colour.
As the image above shows in order to get the right texture for the background and not have a textured effect on the main images I masked out the textures on these items.
With the brush tool I outlined the gramaphone and the face, just to give a light definition.
There was a real need for some bold colour in this image. After looking at different objects objects that could be used to add colours I finally settled on a crisp red rose image. The colour of this was slightly too dark so I darkened it to more of a blood red.This gave me the idea of changing the hair colour of the girl. The white bloude hair was blending into the background far too much, so with the use of a mask and a large soft brush I added a red tint, lowering the opacity so that it was not too strange gave the hair a pinkish look.
Paint splatters were aso added to start to give the image a rough type of look and feel to it. I also used a brush to create some blood splatters on the face.
My next thought was to bluck out the main image. I felt that instead of adding more ‘heavy’ objects to the image, lighter ones would be best. So stuck to a floral theme and added some leaves. To be in keeping with an abstract I idea I masked the leaves and gave them a adjustment layer to make them bluish in look. After duplicating the leave several times I changed one of these to have a more golden look to it.
Different leaves were added and I changed the colours to match accordingly.
To keep the image in balance I needed to add some darker elements to counter act the newly placed leaves. Here I took the rose image and changed the black and white level and the levels inorder to give a black effect. these were duplicated and placed along the bottom of the main cluster. The black rose layers I played around with and finally stuck to using a ‘Exclusion’ blending mode, this gave the roses a transparent/ghostly/liquid look.
When searching for vegitation elements to include I came across some thorn and branch images. At first I didn’t think that I would add them to the scene as a full vegitation feel was not the look I was ultimately going for. However, to give some sharpness to the image I added a selection of these. With a mask on I used the splatter effect that I previously used on the branches and thorns, just to keep with the rough look as well.
tiasmoore 