Crazy Combo: We're All Mad Here

For this project I used images of animals, specifically a grey wolf, a hare, a lion and a dragon to combine with photos I had taken in order to create chimeras. A chimera refers to any impossible animal that is a combination of other creatures parts, such as a manticore.

Firstly, I had to use the quick selection and lasso tools to select the parts of the animal and potions of the photo that I wanted to use. I sent these selections to a new layer via cut, and deleted the layers with the unneeded remainder of the photos. From there came the long, arduous task of going through and erasing along the edges to make the photos appear nice and clean. (This would have been a lot easier with a tablet, but since I only had a  computer mouse available it took me longer than I would have liked.) After the majority of the erasing was done I positioned the animal parts and photos so it would look like the ears, tails, and wings were actually a part of the photo. Then there was more erasing, and more erasing, and more erasing...

Finally, I had everything the way I wanted it and put in my background layer (a scene from Alice in Wonderland). I re-adjusted a few of the images so it looked like they were interacting the background more and to maintain a general sense of balance in the image.

The final touch was the "Were all mad here..." which was created using the text tool.

I'm really proud of this image, it took a lot of work and really turned out nicely. I love all the colors and how they work together. I also like that I took a more unique take on this assignment, that rather than just combining animals with other animals, I combined animals with people. In the end the separate images really worked together well and looked like they belonged together.

If I were to try this assignment again, I'd want to try it with a tablet to cut down on the time and difficulty with erasing.