Day 84 : Make a Mosaic

Kim's assignment this week was to make a mosaic, or collage.  I chose some pictures from our trip to Alaska last summer.  In Fairbanks, we took the very well-done Riverboat Discovery Tour.  One stop on the tour was The Chena Indian Village.   There were so many things to photograph there, I decided to focus on the buckskinner aspects of the Village for this assignment.

Each image is on it's own layer which allows you to rotate

Background Texture : Kim Klassen's Paper and Paste
Brushes : Bear Tracks from Obsidian Dawn's SS_Animal Tracks
Brushes : Cottonwood Leaf from Shady Medusa's Foliage 01
Font : Clive Barker

It took me a while to find the perfect brush for the cottonwood leaf.  I remember smelling the Balsam Cottonwoods in Fairbanks.   It was the time of year their fragrant resin was running.  That is one of my favorite smells on this beautiful Earth!

Gypsy Dancer

Gypsy Dances in the Flames of the Burning City

This looks like a simple collage, and in truth, I did try cutting out the silhouette of the dancer with the intention of gluing her down onto the page. But she had too many fine details, and the edges of the paper came out white. Not good.

On to the more complicated Plan B : I wanted to do it on my computer with graphics software.

The background image is from one of my National Geographic and Citrasolv experiments last summer. I always thought this image looked like a city on fire since you could still see a building in the top right corner. The ink dissolved and ran like flames as it dried ...

It called out for a dancer in the foreground ... so I got a stock image and learned about layers, and alpha channels, and (with my sweet husband's help) got these 2 images to work together. Not so simple as a quick cut and paste.

I used Seashore 3 for Mac. It's kind of a GIMP-lite. I'm not quite ready for GIMP yet.