As you may recall, my wrap text is functionally retarded. It seems like it also applies to images. 
Countless gradient maps, adjustment layers, pen tool points, magic wands, extracts, soft brush, erasers, vector masks, clone tools, history brushes (and all the things in between) later...
This project was pretty challenging. At first, I was pretty shaky on the concept. I wanted something based off of Antonie Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, but there weren't any tutorials that could help me and n its conceptual/early constructional stages it was pretty shaky and lackluster. After that idea, it progressed to a Jules Vernesque fantastical underwater scene, but researching underwater tutorials yielded nothing that vaguely resembled or even could vaguely resembled something from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. So I changed my idea to something more surreal and fantastical. The tutorial it's based off was discussed in the previous post. I knew I wanted a floating island of some sort, something reminiscent of Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky (reference here) -- a baobab tree to homage Exupery, out of a dilapidated castle floating with a tangle of roots. The problem came with execution. I couldn't find any large images of the roots of trees, and I didn't want to use a silhouette. The perspective was off, while I did find the perfect castle component with an artist's rendition of the Tower of Babel. I was a bit too ambitious in the beginning, and the design has changed a lot since then. Originally, the castle-tree-island was supposed to be the focus in a free floating sky, but the lack of shadows subsequently gave it a serious lack of depth. I thought other elements that I had planned (such as a fish shaped hot air balloon with a strawberry carrier) would make up for it, but the composite sky canvas (stitched and clone tools together from several images) remained recalcitrantly mundane. Instead, I decided to place the surrealism to a place perhaps a bit more down to earth I researched Moorish architecture. I really wanted to use Alhambra, but couldn't find any suitable images so I settled on a simple Gothic cathedral. During the process, the pen tool was arguably my best friend and worst enemy - Extract marred the image, but pen tool assuredly gave me carpal tunnel. From there, it was a matter of clone tooling. The mess of roots that was to be never came to fruition - instead I took the turtle idea from the tutorial and shopped the roots to wrap around the turtle's shell. The most difficult aspect of this project was perspective. The cathedral was taken at an unique angle that was difficult to emulate even with extreme use of warp and perspective in free transform. As a result, the end product is admittedly somewhat fractured. The origami cranes proved to be a whimsical component, and the sea life added carried through one of my initial ideas of a fantastical underwater scene. The hot air ballon got replaced by a blimp and clone tool came into play once again to give the background composition some depth. The adjustment layers unified the colors significantly -- before, the look was a bit off because of all the different images in different lighting and setting.
Overall,it was a rewarding project and the end result is something I'm satisfied with.
