Project 25: Blending Body Parts

Teehee, I've been having fun with this one! The course materials show a Leatherman multi-tool taking the place of a finger on someone's hand. The instructions say "For your own part of the project, conceive and execute a similar surrealist image. How similar is entirely up to you."

I showed my daughter, who is three, the image of the hand, and she chuckled. I explained that I had to make a funny image myself, and she suggested that I use her favourite pink teddy as part of it. She's a bit obsessed with this teddy, so it came as no surprise. Anyway - she really liked the idea of me putting her head on to the teddy, so I took a shot of her sitting on the sofa, and one of the teddy:

I then pasted the head shot on to the teddy bear shot as a separate layer, and using a soft-edged brush, I roughly erased around the edges of my daughter's head. Holding the 'shift' key down to retain proportions, I resized the head shot until it matched the size of the teddy bear's head:

Then working at 100% zoom, I carefully used a smaller brush to erase any parts of the neck still showing. Around the edges of the hair, I used a soft-edged brush at 50% opacity to carefully erase and blend the different shades of the sofa together. It was necessary to use the 'clone' tool in some places where the teddy's head became visible.

Here's the final result, with a 'levels' boost to increase contrast and a shadow added under the chin with a low opacity grey paintbrush:

A low-resolution version has been uploaded here, but even at full resolution, the blend is fairly seamless.

My mind is thinking of all sorts of surreal combinations of images I could produce now! I'd like to try messing around with different scales - for instance, putting a very small person next to a large picture of a daisy, or something similar - but I'll have to go out and take some photos specifically for that purpose.

Here's one using photos from my archive - a canary with a gingerbread rabbit for a head - it doesn't get much more surreal than that!