How is it done?

Well, it starts with some photographs. First I take pictures of whatever I will need for the final image. In the case of "Learning to Fly," that included a shot of a two month old baby with her mom, several flower shots, and eight butterflies (one butterfly for the faeries' wings and seven more butterflies to flit among the flowers). Since I use a digital camera, it's easy to get the pictures into my computer and once they're in there, I can manipulate them however I want.

I work primarily in Adobe Photoshop® CS2 with some Ulead® PhotoImpact® XL for special effects like faerie lights. In Photoshop® I use multiple layers, not only to combine the various pictures (such as models, props and backgrounds), but to add depth and realism to a picture. It is very important when you're combining photos to make sure that you adjust them all to match in scale, focus, color, lighting, and shadows.

To make "Learning to Fly," I first worked on the faeries. I slimmed down the new mom (let's face it, faerie moms probably don't have to worry about post-partum weight gain!), added butterfly wings, changed both faeries' hair and skin tones to match the orange wings, and dressed them in flowers. Once that was done, I could put the faerie mom and baby into the background picture, taking care that they were in the area of the photo with the clearest focus. (Because the flower bed pic was a macro close-up, the foreground and background become out of focus rather quickly.)

At that point, I rearranged some flowers for a better composition and layered the flowers of the flower bed so that the faeries looked like they were in the original photo, not just layered on top. Next I added seven butterflies amongst the flowers and then adjusted the lighting and shadows so that all of the pictures looked like they belonged together. Last, but not least, I took a flattened version of the merged image into PhotoImpact® to add the faerie lights ... and "Learning to Fly" was done!