A Contemporary Digital Collage of BBC Sherlock

Clues flying at the speed of light - Sherlock brains his way unraveling mysteries!  The excellent cast and production of the BBC Sherlock series have caused me to want to create a collage that has a contemporary feel and looks somewhat like a traditional collage made with paper scraps with some of the images looking cut out.

It is more involved than many of my collages with more images on different layers (see below).

This is a new look for me and a style that I have dreamed about doing, kind of contemporary without a lot of fussy detail which I seem to do without trying! 

Although some would argue this design is not exactly simplistic, I like that I did not have to be exact in cutting some things out (time consuming), with some images having a rough cut look and not much shading except to use the photo editor curves to lighten or darken some images.  One of my first attempts at painting are in this image.  I painted Sherlock's scarf, as small a thing as that can still not look right if you are not careful.  It wasn't as hard to find the right color and paint it as I thought, so little by little I think I will be doing more painting.

The way this image turned out has given me confidence to want to do some shading with the paint brush and maybe color some areas to emphasis an object in another project.  I did have to do some resizing of images which is normal and makes designing in a digital editor a joy.  Objects can be reduced and not enlarged because pixels can become stretched.  Sometimes I do enlarge as long as it is not stretched too much and put a texture over it.

I got the idea to add to this image the Union Jack for some extra punch although I still like the above image for it's simple design.  I kept these images somewhat dark for a mysterious look somewhat like the BBC

 
dark blue toned ad image with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman looking as though they are on a case in the dark of night.

I am currently working on another project, a Downton Abbey image.  It is always a challenge to try to find images that will have the right look and get the overall style I have in my mind.  A lot of the time I get ideas as I am working on a project.  I am trying for somewhat of a period look, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.  I thought I would share it in the unfinished stage so you can see some of my process.

The image has a large white border around it, I'm not sure what I am going to do with the border, I may make an invitation out of the whole image as if inviting the viewer to a garden party or skeet shoot.  I'm still working out the coloration and not finding the colors of the textures easy to erase so I may get rid of the textures and try painting the different colors.

I see myself gradually getting more and more into painting which is a very good thing.   Painting can be less cumbersome than trying to add textures (I often add two and three to get the right color and effect) and sometimes taking some of it off.  Textures have their place though.

Right out of the program editor (see below)!  I used a color photo of the real Downton Abbey, Highclere

 

Castle (see above), which I desaturated (made into a black and white image) and then used threshold to turn it into a black and white line image.  There is also an old photo of a real servant standing beside a color photo of a yellow and black Rolls Royce. Believe it or not when you view the servant at 50% he turns out to be a handsome young man with white powdered hair!

My gallery website:  http://suzanne-powers.artistwebsites.com/featured/sherlock-holmes-ii-suzanne-powers.html