Lie inspired me to create some work using double exposures, where I would be combining the animal's habitat with the actual animal itself. For this I went out and took some pictures at the duck pond near my house. Sadly there weren't very many that day, but I managed to get a nice picture of one of a female Mallard Duck. The duck was the first image I edited, I chose it because it was quite a simple outline to select and it was going to be a good starting point to practice with. Now because I wanted to edit more than just the one photo, I also used a picture of a black bird that I have used in my previous edits for the work inspired by Charlotte Caron. This photo was also quite simple to work with, the outline of the bird wasn't too tricky to follow and the picture turned out okay in the end.
I work at a local stable yard in the New Forest, and I decided that after school one day I was going to meet up with my friend whom I work with, and take some pictures of her horse Strider. I met up with her the Monday after college and we brought her horse into the outdoor school and using a lunge whip managed to make him canter around so I could get some action shots. I set my camera to sports mode and using my 50 - 200mm Nikon lens I began taking photos. When it came to editing, the horse was the trickiest by far, seeing as I had to deal with selecting around the mane and tail hair as well as some slightly covered hooves.
Here are the three original pictures I used:
Here is a walkthrough on how I edited these final pieces using GIMP 2.8 (because over the Easter Holidays I didn't have access to a school Mac where I could use Photoshop), using a picture I took of a mouse last summer as my example:
Firstly after opening up the image in GIMP, (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Project), I duplicated the layer and used the Free Select Tool to begin selecting around my mouse. I have my own Wacom Bamboo Tablet so this is a much easier process than if I were to be using my laptop's mouse.
Once selected, I used the controls CTRL + C (Mac CMD + C) to copy and CTRL + V (Mac CMD + V) to paste it onto a new layer. I then right clicked and added an Alpha Channel, so that my image would have transparency rather than a solid block of colour as the background.
After having added the transparency, I went to File > Open As New Layer and selected the image I wanted to use as my background for this project. I just used a picture of my garden seeing as that's where mice live.
Although this isn't always necessary, I wanted to re-scale the image of the garden so I could fit it around my selection. To do this I used the Scaling tool. When the dialog box opens, I made sure that the dimensions were chained by clicking on the little chain picture by them. This means that when I alter one dimension, the other will change size automatically and accordingly to the number I have changed, so that the image will re-scale to the exact same dimensions.
Once the image has been re-scaled, I make sure that that layer is under the layer of the pasted mouse, and under the layer from which the mouse was cut. This is so when we move on to the next step, you will begin to see what the image will look like as a finished product.
Begin lowering the opacity of the pasted mouse layer. I always make sure I go too far and then work my way up to a preferred opacity. For me this meant decreasing the opacity by 44%.
Once I've found an opacity I think works well for my image, I replace the original layer the mouse was cut out from for one of a solid colour, I played around with the colours and settled one a greeny-yellow colour for my background.
After this I needed to crop my image so the mouse wasn't so small on such a big background. I did this by selecting the crop tool and, well, cropping.
Once I'm happy with the result, I head over to File > Export As... (or Shift + Ctrl + E) and save my picture.
And voilà! Here's the finished product:
Having said that, these are the background textures I used for my actual projects:
For the blackbird:
For the horse:
Using the exact same editing process I demonstrated above, I combined the images together to created some work which was inspired by Andreas Lie.
Here are all the edits I created:
I edited the horse twice. This was because I didn't at all like how that edit turned out in the end. I disliked the fact you couldn't really tell what the background was apart from had you seen the original picture previously, and I also disliked the random horse head on the horse's shoulder. I decided to then re-edit, creating a much better piece in my opinion. At least now you could tell what the background was, and I figured that seeing as the horse is moving, the background flows far nicer with the image than the previous background did. Something quite subtly which I also like is how the shine on the horse's skin looks like a lightning bolt coming down from the sky in the second version. I thought this was quite a sly way of making the two pictures really become one.
Overall I don't think my edits turned out as nice as I thought they would, they didn't really look as realistic as I'd wanted them to, and sadly my editing skills don't quite allow me to make the portraits as breathtaking as I would have loved them to be like those of Lie's. I do however believe that this series of photos I have edited have allowed me to practice toward my final piece, it has taught me a few GIMP skills I wasn't aware of beforehand (because I usually used Photoshop for this kind of editing) such as quick way to resize an image, and a few shortcuts here and there that help me edit a lot quicker than before. I intend on using these skills I have developed when it comes to editing my final piece.
I work at a local stable yard in the New Forest, and I decided that after school one day I was going to meet up with my friend whom I work with, and take some pictures of her horse Strider. I met up with her the Monday after college and we brought her horse into the outdoor school and using a lunge whip managed to make him canter around so I could get some action shots. I set my camera to sports mode and using my 50 - 200mm Nikon lens I began taking photos. When it came to editing, the horse was the trickiest by far, seeing as I had to deal with selecting around the mane and tail hair as well as some slightly covered hooves.
Here are the three original pictures I used:
Here is a walkthrough on how I edited these final pieces using GIMP 2.8 (because over the Easter Holidays I didn't have access to a school Mac where I could use Photoshop), using a picture I took of a mouse last summer as my example:
 |
| Free Select Tool |
 |
| Mouse after I have completed the selection |
After having added the transparency, I went to File > Open As New Layer and selected the image I wanted to use as my background for this project. I just used a picture of my garden seeing as that's where mice live.
Although this isn't always necessary, I wanted to re-scale the image of the garden so I could fit it around my selection. To do this I used the Scaling tool. When the dialog box opens, I made sure that the dimensions were chained by clicking on the little chain picture by them. This means that when I alter one dimension, the other will change size automatically and accordingly to the number I have changed, so that the image will re-scale to the exact same dimensions. 
Once the image has been re-scaled, I make sure that that layer is under the layer of the pasted mouse, and under the layer from which the mouse was cut. This is so when we move on to the next step, you will begin to see what the image will look like as a finished product.
Once I've found an opacity I think works well for my image, I replace the original layer the mouse was cut out from for one of a solid colour, I played around with the colours and settled one a greeny-yellow colour for my background. 
After this I needed to crop my image so the mouse wasn't so small on such a big background. I did this by selecting the crop tool and, well, cropping.
Once I'm happy with the result, I head over to File > Export As... (or Shift + Ctrl + E) and save my picture.
And voilà! Here's the finished product:
Having said that, these are the background textures I used for my actual projects:
For the blackbird:
 |
| Unkknown photographer, used from Google Images |
 |
| Picture of me riding on Holm Hill, Brockenhurst, New Forest, 2015 |
 |
| Photo taken by me, North Weirs, Brockenhurst, New Forest, 2016 |
For the duck:
 |
| Unknown photographer, location unknown, taken from Google Images |
Using the exact same editing process I demonstrated above, I combined the images together to created some work which was inspired by Andreas Lie.
Here are all the edits I created:
I edited the horse twice. This was because I didn't at all like how that edit turned out in the end. I disliked the fact you couldn't really tell what the background was apart from had you seen the original picture previously, and I also disliked the random horse head on the horse's shoulder. I decided to then re-edit, creating a much better piece in my opinion. At least now you could tell what the background was, and I figured that seeing as the horse is moving, the background flows far nicer with the image than the previous background did. Something quite subtly which I also like is how the shine on the horse's skin looks like a lightning bolt coming down from the sky in the second version. I thought this was quite a sly way of making the two pictures really become one.
Overall I don't think my edits turned out as nice as I thought they would, they didn't really look as realistic as I'd wanted them to, and sadly my editing skills don't quite allow me to make the portraits as breathtaking as I would have loved them to be like those of Lie's. I do however believe that this series of photos I have edited have allowed me to practice toward my final piece, it has taught me a few GIMP skills I wasn't aware of beforehand (because I usually used Photoshop for this kind of editing) such as quick way to resize an image, and a few shortcuts here and there that help me edit a lot quicker than before. I intend on using these skills I have developed when it comes to editing my final piece.
I am aware that these photos are very similar to those of Lie's that I have used as inspiration. I did not intend on copying him at all, but that just seems to be the way the edits worked out. I know that when it comes to editing my final piece, I need to make the edits a lot more my own, rather than so similar to those of my chosen artist.
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