Photomontage Looking Through

 

This is my first time using Photoshop to do a self-portrait photomontage and don’t want to leave out it is a hijack of one of my favorite artist Vincent Van Gogh.  It was super fun creating a montage of reflections of myself.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of acrylic painting of some cute characters so I decided to pick Tuxedo Sam from Sanrio.  I thought Tuxedo could be floating on a star with a balloon in the sky that was painted by Van Gogh.  I feel like I also drift to different places when looking at such a beautiful paintings. 

The bricks represents industry and lack of creativity.  You can also think of the bricks as representative of the places we go to everyday such as businesses and school building that a person spends so much of their life within.

  

The vines represented how I feel as I break away from society and go hiking and find beauty in the great outdoors.  I decided to use the vines wrapping idea as I found it to look the most fascinating and portrayed a portal to another place within.

I was originally going to use The Olive Orchard, 1889 by Vincent van Gogh but it didn’t feel vibrant enough so I ended up using Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890 by Vincent Van Gogh that I found on the National Gallery of Art. 

The methods that I used in Photoshop to hijack the famous image began by first bringing in the images that I would need to work on my photomontage.  I started by getting all the images I needed which included:
2 images of vines, image of a brick wall, one of my own paintings and Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890 by Vincent van Gogh.

 

I then began to create my image by doing the following steps that follow.

1.    Vines:  It took me a while to find a good way to organize the vines in a way that I liked.  I mostly used the free transform tool change and move the objects around. I began with a normal looking vine but it didn’t look right.  The vines looked a bit strange so I used the filter gallery’s cutout style to give the vines a stylized look.

2.    Organize layers:  Once done with the vines I put the two layers in a folder to keep everything neat while working.  I also made sure to name all my layers to keep myself organized.

3.    Brick Wall:  After that I took the brick wall image and put it as the background.  I noticed that the wall didn’t match with the vines very well so I used filter gallery again.  This time I used Accented Edges to make sure that the wall kept all its texture but still looked stylized.  I originally tried to use the same cut out style from earlier but the bricks had so much texture so it didn’t work as it had for the vines.

4.    Portal:  Next I began to work on the portal part which is the inside of the vines crossing over.  To make sure everything stayed within the portal crossing vine I copied a piece of the brick wall inside the vines and used that to have the other objects be clipping to it with a clipping mask.

5.    Hijack Image:  Then I took the Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890 by Vincent van Gogh and was able to incorporate into my photomontage by using create clipping mask and clipping it to the brick wall.

6.    Tuxedo Sam: I then brought my painting of a penguin sitting on a star over to the image and made the penguin separate from its background by selecting the image and then pasting it into a new layer.  I kept another copied image of Tuxedo Sam and placed behind as overlay blending mode.  Setting the blending mode to overlay then makes the colors less noticeable but still there.

7.    Smoky Ring:  Once done with all of that I used the brush tool to make a smoky ring around the portal to create a three dimensional feel as if you could step in or out of this world.

 

Sources:

Images by Ashley Serafino

·       Acrylic Painting of Tuxedo Sam

·       Vines created in Photoshop

 

Adobe Clipart:

·       Bricks

 

National Gallery of Art

·       Green Wheat Fields, Auvers,1890 by Vincent Van Gogh

 

Cite:

Green wheat fields, Auvers. (n.d.). https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.163323.html

 

“Brick Wall Images – Browse 21,069,809 Stock Photos, Vectors, and Video.” Adobe Stock, stock.adobe.com/search?k=brick+wall&search_type=usertyped.