Digital mixed media recipe - how to bottle a mermaid

Ingredients
1 picture of clear bottles
1 picture of a bottle stopper
2 mermaid pictures
1 picture of a human skeleton
1 picture of fish skeleton
Photoshop or similar image editing programme

Method
This is a good way to practice the reusing old journal pages as in the instructions for  the Strathmore Workshop 1. I wanted to make a display of "preserved mermaids" for a chunky book pages swap I am doing called Cabinet of Curiosities; the idea is that these belonged to an old collector of oddities.

I found some old mermaid pictures I had drawn and scanned and opened them in Photoshop.

Using the lassoo tool  and a graphics tablet I drew round the mermaids, and cut them out.

I mermaid had open eyes so I used the lassoo and the clone stamp tool to remove most of the eyes so they appeared closed.

I used the fish and human skeletons to help me to draw a mermaid skeleton, and also lifted that from the background using the magic wand tool.

I lassoed the bottle stopper

Then I dragged and resized the images so they were "in" the bottles. 


I flipped one of the skeletons, made it smaller and put it upside down in one bottle for variety.










I used the vibrance tool to make the mermaids look pale and pickled!

Changing the opacity puts the skeleton "deeper" into the bottle - I did not use this option as the final pages are only 4" by 4" and I though the detail would not show up enough on such a small scale