hommage à Mary Ann Moss

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Mary Ann, over at Dispatch from LA has been photographing Chinese lanterns, then making collages using her images (and other ephemera). She uses the collages as journal pages. I love her work..... Read the words in her post, too........ I'll wait for you.

Nice, eh?



Not having a Chinatown here, I found one lantern.

Here's my original image:





Here is my inspired-by-Mary-Ann image:





I selected just the lantern, made it a new layer (by copying), and then slipped a color-only teal layer between the lantern and the background, and messed with the opacity till I was satisfied with the depth of color. I looked through my "texture" pics, and chose a scratchy-looking cement wall. I copied that on top of the other layers, and then adjusted the opacity to suit. I put the text on. I used the "impressionist brush" on the edges (trying things at random! and discovering that the faster I moved the "brush," and the smaller I made it, the more ragged the edge).

Then I saved it as a jpg, and opened the new jpg. After copying the background to a layer, I selected the white area around the edge, deleted that white, and added a drop shadow. Then I decided the contrast was a bit stark with the white background, so I slid a gray solid-color layer between the background and the ragged-edge copy. I messed with the opacity of the gray a bit, slid up the saturation, and declared done-ness.

Not nearly as nice as Mary Ann's. So much less rich (love the herbal suppliment bit in the corner. and the other ephemera she used.....) But ya gotta love teal and orange.......... And ya gotta start somewhere. I want to do more and more digital collage......................

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