The above are variations of my final chimera piece, all are me messing about with Photoshop filters. I need to decide which looks best unfortunately though. Indecisiveness is a curse. Anyway, I decided ages ago that I wanted to do an abstract montage of my chimera in a bag photos rather than just make an actual object out of them. We were told that the meaning of chimera was not to be taken literally anyway so I hope that my version is okay. I made this piece by first taking my photos, isolating the individual item using the magic wand/magic eraser in Photoshop then arranging them on a gradiated background that I created in Illustrator. Bringing it all back into Photoshop, I then played around with the 'Polar Co-ordinates' filter. I had intended to make it look like a little planet at first in using this filter but wasn't happy with the end result so I just kept filtering my image until I got a nice effect. Then I brought it back into Illustrator, used the pen tool to draw some abstract flowing geometric shapes and added them to the piece to give it movement. I also emphasised the 'Vaseline sun' by drawing around it with a chalk effect brush and adding 'sun rays'. Overall, this is the kind of thing I want to do for my dust cover aswell so I treated it as a test run. I'm fairly satisfied with the result.
