Fantasy Landscape (Manipulated Images).

After a few disappointing attempts at photoshopping, I finally came up with another time related idea that I could work with that fits in with my theme. My grandfather always used the phrase 'Tempus Fugit' (Time Flies), so this is sort of in memory of him. I chose a picture of two small boats on the sea with an atmospheric sky above. I enjoy crafting and at the moment I love the Steam Punk genre. I found some metal clock faces and wooden wings and decided to take photos of the two together. This rather looked like birds. My idea was to have the birds flying towards the viewer being smaller in the distance and gradually getting larger towards the foreground. I was a bit dubious at first but having looked at the finished result I'm quite enamoured. I also enjoyed the manipulating and started to understand what I was doing more. I wasn't so afraid to use the different photoshop tools.

'Tempus Fugit'

First of all I started with the background layer which was the ships on water and then used another four layers for the individual clocks. On each of these layers I used the Quick Selection Tool to pick up the outline of the clock/birds. I then manipulated each one by using the tools such as Skew, Distort and Perspective. This gave the effect of birds flying into the front of the picture from a distance. To perfect the picture I played around with the scale and position of each bird/clock. I decided to have the closest one slightly off view to make it more lifelike. I then flattened the image so I could save it.

It might have been a good idea to have had a few extremely tiny birds in the background to give more depth, but then I was worried that you may not have been able to see the clock faces. The original picture was quite a simple comprising only sky and sea with just a few boats in the distance so I'm glad that I kept the bird/clock idea quite simple as I feel that in this case less is more.