Illustration Friday - Jump

Coming down to the wire on this one.  I decided to try to do something à la Maggie Taylor who creates wonderfully surreal, dreamlike images. The problem with that is that she will spend months on a work, whereas I had two days to put this together.  You can read an interesting article about her working methods here.

I first went looking at stock.xchng for a photo of something jumping and chose the horse, mainly because it looked easy to extract from its background (and I like horses as well).  It wasn't a very large or sharp image, however, and I added the eye and a little of the head detailing from another horse photo which I found there and also colored the bridle.  The background is one of my photos, duplicated to get the width I needed.  And, oh, I see an area where I missed changing it so it doesn't look like the same image twice. Then I kept duplicating and cloning the grass to achieve the depth I wanted. After I combined it all as a Smart Object, I used Paint Daubs, Film Grain and Smudge Stick filters on it.  The girl is from an old photo from The Graphics Fairy; I colored her clothing with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.  The little flowers are some periwinkles cut out from another of my photos, with some grass from Photoshop brushes.  The last thing was trying to find something interesting for the horse to jump over, and nothing I tried satisfied me.  Finally I thought of goldfish bowls, and I luckily found a photo, again on stock.xchng.  Getting all the shadows right, or at least believable, was somewhat problematic, but they're okay, I think. The final step was to distress the image for which I used some grunge brushes by ShadyMedusa-stock which I found at Design Resource Box.  I really had intended to make this commentary more informative for those who might be interested, but with time running out, merely getting it finished and linked on Illustration Friday was uppermost in my mind.