Photo Montaging

Making an image your own

After finding the Banksy style street art and getting home and doing more research I found that although I think the images I captured were interesting, they were also pretty common and nothing was making them stand out from other peoples pictures.

So I sat down and had a little think about how I could put my own individual stamp on them and I thought about photo montaging.

Montaging Images

Photomontage is a widely used technique that has been carried out by photographers, artists and graphic designers for years.  It consists of layering images or cutting and cropping pieces of an image to create the illusion that all of the photo elements are part of the same image.  This made me think of some other photographs I had taken the same day at a near by nature reserve 'Berry Head', I thought that by layering my Banksy images on top of relevant photographs of the coastal walk I would be creating something completely individual and putting my own twist on the work of the anonymous street artist.

Here are my Results:

'Flying Without Wings' By Melissa Wale ©

'Summer Loving' By Melissa Wale ©

'Watch Me Go' By Melissa Wale ©

I used simple photo montaging skills to do this, obviously this technique gets a lot more complicated than this, maybe I can have a go at some more complex photo montaging later on.  But like Banksy's style of graffiti I wanted my end results to hold the same simplicity and 'speak for their self' style.

How to ..

1. Using Photoshop, open the bottom image (the image that is going to be the base).
2. Open the second image, these may open one on top of the other, if this happens select 'arrange documents' at the top, on the middle bar and select the '2 up' option.
3. Then using the 'move tool' drag the second image and drop it on to the first image.
4. In the top of the layers box there is an option 'opacity' drag this up and down until you have your desired opacity on the top image.
5. Finally using the 'gradient' tool you can slightly blur the edges if you find them a bit harsh.

Have fun photo montaging! Please share with me your results!

With Love, Milley x