May 4th was not too difficult, although I had to fight with Photoshop for a while, as I didn't fully understand one of the tools. Basically, I took a shot of myself agains a light background, did my usual cut-out and did mostly what was in this tutorial. I was originally going to paint hinges on my elbows and knees and suspend wires from the top of the pergola in the garden, but then I stumbled across this whilst looking for something else, so went with it.
April 5th was a bit of a reworking on the fly. I originally envisaged a picture of me with camera lenses as eyes (might still have to do that, now that I come to think of it). I took a few test shots holding the lens up to my eye and, considering that I had to rush out to collect our house-guests from the airport, decided to use one of them pretty much as-was except for the ubiquitous Urban Acid action.
April 6th was another bit of a rush-job, given that we had our house-guests and a rather busy weekend programme. I originally intended the laptop to be displaying an X-ray image of a ribcage. I did, indeed, shoot this on the 6th, but didn't process it until a day or so later and was somewhat too lazy to go searching the interweb for an X-ray shot, so used an earlier SP, instead for the screen display. Again, I selected the background and replaced it (changed a rather nasty off-white/cream for the much less offensive grey) by adding a layer mask and painting black over the selection. I then added a background layer of grey and, above that, added another layer on which I put a gradient from black to transparent. I then reduced the opacity of this gradient layer, so that the effect was a little more subtle. I then copied the boots shot and pasted it in as a new layer. I used the 'Transform' menu option to shrink the boots pic until it fitted the laptop screen (or thereabouts) and that was it.
May 7th was done using this tutorial, which I found, like the puppet one, while I was looking into how to do the smashed glass effect. I just took a shot, while trying to ensure that it had enough contrast for the techniques to work properly, and followed the tutorial steps. It has to be said that there was an awful lot of cursing involved and an awful lot of mucking around getting each individual element lined up in the final shot.
Well, that's it. I'm done. If I were to have any further pearls of wisdom, it would be to shamelessly steal ideas you admire and adapt them to suit your particular thoughts for a picture. I'd be really grateful if anyone who might have read this could point out the mistakes I made while playing around in Photoshop and correct them, so that others don't take the same time-wasting steps.
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