Some of you have asked how I do my digital constructions. This one, "The Empress," is just a simple montage of photographic elements that I have cropped, adjusted, and filtered in Photoshop and then arranged on the background. It is really not that much different from doing a montage or collage of paper and mixed media elements. The principles of composition and color are the same.
After finding all the images, I lassooed and selected the parts I wanted to use, arranged them in layers in the Photoshop workspace, adjusted the brightness, contrasts, levels, hues, saturations, and colors, transformed the layers, applied blurs, smudges, noise, fills, and clones, rendered lighting effects and lens flares, painted in sparkles, and erased anything that just did not work well. Then I flattened the piece.
This one took about three hours to construct and I entered the same artistic "zone-out" (alpha state?) as if I were creating with real paint or pen. In my opinion, the art is in making all the elements jive together and resona
te. The photographic croppings and the photoshop program are just the tools... just like a paint brush or scuptor's clay.
Here are all the images I used to make the "The Empress." They are all free use images from Morguefile and Flickr Commons plus a cannibalization of one of my previous montages, "The Amber Necklace."
ljgloyd (c) 2011, originally published 3/2010.
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