....by any other name...

[red_satin_doll]

Promotional photo of SMG by Greg Gorman for Season 5 of btvs from The Chosen Two gallery. (ETA: Thank you infinitewhale for providing Gorman's name.) It's one of my favorite images of Sarah - promotional photography as high art - and I'm not sure that a prettier image of her exists. I wanted to do an image where I used a lace texture over her face, specifically cropping close to he eye, but couldn't achieve what I wanted. I'm still too new with textures (or what I think of as "overlays"), knowing how to crop them and size them to match the other image, to make it work quite yet. I was vaguely inspired by the composition one of teragramm's gorgeous, beyond-the-beyond Spuffy artworks, "Darkness and Light" that maybe someday I'll be able to touch with the tip of my little finger.

I photographed my landlord's rose in July of 2013, a month before our apartment fire, when summer was high and everything in front of his yard was in bloom. (in other words, before everything went to shit. Now it's almost a year later and of course 2014 was going to be better and it has been except for losing my only...oh, you know
what? Never mind.)

I used a cropped, unsigned version of the rose photo as a texture in ipiccy over the photo of Sarah, fiddled with brightness, contrast, etc; alternated Orton effect, which creates that nice, soft luminous "bloom" and the plain old softening tool, with the sharpening/clarifying tool. Then I brought it over to Photobucket for a little more blending work on the face, a little more sharpening/clarifying of the edges, and topped it with my beloved "San Carmen" effect, which warms and softens it further and adds that nifty "vintage photo" edging. Ta-dah!

Not bad for one of my first real efforts at using "textures" - or an overlay, or whatnot; it took a lot of tries and rejected efforts but I think I got the balance of the flower and her face just right.  If I do it over again I'd center the blossom and her face most likely, although I'm not sure if I'd actually like it better that way. I'm  slowly teaching myself how to match images as textures to the photo I'm working with, what size does each need to be and how to crop both of them so they match up the way I want them to every time I fiddle around.

Hopefully I'm one step closer to making a fic banner/poster for a very special friend in this fandom that I've got mulling about in my head.

Feedback, whether hugs and puppies or constructive criticism is always appreciated!

As always - please give proper credit and don't change or deface, claim as your own.
Don't hotlink whatever the heck that means - I don't know but everybody says don't do it so it must be bad.
And don't put in another website without asking first or doing any of that really uncool shit that you know you're not supposed to do
and which my friends wouldn't even think of doing because they're artists themselves and just wouldn't. Knowwhatimean?