1. I set up an open book (A Tale of Two Cities, The Heritage Press, 1938) sitting on closed book (The Pickwick Papers, The Heritage Press, 1938) , resting on blue and gold fabric, and photographed it. This became my background layer. I corrected the image using exposure, levels, and hue/sat.
2. I placed a decorative pocket watch against three books, photographed it, and later selected the watch, pasted it within the blue/gold portion of the background and partially behind the open book. I lowered the opacity to make it somewhat transparent, and increase the saturation a little.
3. I selected a photograph of my son, desaturated it, and changed it's hue. I pasted it into the middle foreground of the composition, and reduced the opacity to give it a ghostly appearance.
4a. I photographed an illustration from the story, A Christmas Carol on page 61 (of Five Christmas Novels , The Heritage Press, 1939) titled, Bob Cratchit Comes Home. I lowered the opacity and ..... I pasted it into the background, lowered the opacity, changed the hue, refined the edges and modified the upper right edge so that it flowed along the same direction as the page of the book it is next to. (I used the line tool to make a line to follow along with and then turned off its visibility afterwards.)
4b. Using the same image, I decided to try out creating a 3D object. (I recently joined NAPP, and received a Photoshop User magazine which gave basic instructions on how to create 3D objects.) I wrapped the images around a spherical shape and then rotated the image so that Tiny Tim and his father would be visible. I added some light to the illustrated sphere, and then pasted it into the background. I played around with hues and levels, increased the saturation, and the object began to become very shiny and reminded me of a Christmas ball. I thought this fit perfectly with the theme of A Christmas Carol, and it is now one of my favorite parts of the composition.
5. Text is used in three different areas.
a. For the quote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." on the clock, I first created a circle with the ellipse tool and made it a work path. Using the type tool I pasted my text onto the circular path - and then copied and pasted this over the clock. Since the clock is not shaped in a perfect circled, I then changed the skew and played around with it until matched the clock's skew as well as possible.
b. For the two other quotes, I gave both a lighter color for the top layer, and a darker one for the shadow, to compensate for the mix of lighter and dark shades in the composition they were being placed on.
I placed the quote, "Please sir, may I have some more?" below the ghostly image of the boy, to make it clear that he is representing Oliver Twist.
c. I placed the quote:
"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into the companionship: compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast."
~ Charles Dickens as a boy in the blacking factory
over the larger image of Tiny Tim and his family as it seemed to be a place where such a large amount of text would fit gracefully, without distracting from the other elements. The Tiny Tim illustration is also used in the Christmas Ball, and he and his father can clearly be viewed there, so I felt the larger image could serve as more of a background to the quoted text. I experimented with justifying the text, but found that I liked have the control over where the lines would break in relation to their meaning, and decided to align the text to the left (ragged right).
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