LMAC Round 99 - The Magic Bottle

This is my entry to the LMAC let's make a collage competition. This fantastic community initiative has been on my radar for so long as I've enjoyed viewing my long-time friend @agmoore's collages. Although I have been making collage art for a while to enhance my creative writing posts, this is my first entry to this awesome competition.

I love writing fantasy fiction, and have been working on a fantasy novel for some time off-chain. If you're interested in reading some of my recent fantasy work check out this short story I wrote yesterday, The Tale of the Mersey Mermaid... or one of the many stories I have written catalogued in My Hive Bookstore.

I've always found that fantasy fiction short stories are enhanced with a carefully selected title image to entice the reader and hint at what the narrative entails. I have been using images from Pixabay to do this from my earliest days on steem/hive in 2017... saying that makes me feel like an old Hivian 😂

It's the many fantasy collage images I have seen over the years that inspired this post.

Creative Process:

First I created a basic idea plan on my notepad (as you can see the idea evolved as I hunted down images to make the collage a reality):

I found a variety of images on both LMAC Image Library and pixabay to make the collage:

Competition image by @shaka	Contributed to the #LIL by @quantumg.
Image by Angela_Yuriko_Smith on Pixabay	Image by Pendleburyannette on Pixabay

_{N.B. 2% beneficiary set to the @quantumg account from this posts rewards for using their image :)}

Image by geralt on Pixabay

After which the real work began:

First I flipped the title image, and then used both the fuzzy select and the eraser tools in GIMP to cut out the sky in @shaka's image so that it could more easily fit in the bottle. I removed everything to the horizon, including the trees, to allow for an easier fade between the magical background in the bottle and the scene of the dwarf's cottage.

Then I added the stock image of the dwarf from pixabay, resized him and spent some time using the 3d transform tool in GIMP to change how he was standing. Next I added the swirly patterned background as the lowest layer and used the eraser tool place the image only in the bottle.

After studying the image for a while I decided the edges of the image of the dwarf's cottage and land inside the bottle didn't blend well enough with the magical bottle background. So I duplicated several of the cottage layers and adjusted the opacity to varying degrees. Then I noticed that the eraser tool had an opacity setting and that I was doing all this the long way round 😂

I used the eraser tool with a medium 'hardness' to erase the edges of the cottage transparent image and then adjusted the opacity to create a merge.

Finally, I added the bottle with transparent background into the main night-time seashore image, flipped and resized it to cover up the skull in the original.

Next, I added a bloom light filter to the bottle, and then spent some time experimenting with the supernova filter. After discarding a few images where I was trying to place a supernova on the bottle layer, I decided to place the supernova behind that image on the main seashore image.

This gave a better effect of light emanating from the magical bottle imprisoning the dwarf.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip into the world fantastic and reading about the process.

Thanks 🙂

_{This final image is 4K (3840/2160) resolution to allow greater detail when zooming into the bottle scene. I confirm I release this image as CC licence public domain, meaning it can be copied, modified and distributed by others, even for commercial purposes, without requiring further permission. If you would like to use it accreditation would be nice in a link below your post 👍}

All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit. I have set @lmac as 20% beneficiary of this post's rewards to help support the community.

If you have enjoyed this creative post, please check out my homepage @raj808 for similar content.

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