'Mary, Mary'... through my eyes

This is my version of the nursery rhyme;

First I loaded my photograph into Photoshop. I then changed the 'Brightness and Contrast' so that the image appeared quite dark and have that deathly and night atmosphere.

From this I then decided that I wanted the sky a different colour, a more moddy colour, so I changed the 'curves', edit>adjustments>curves>RGB. I added more red and blue within the higlights but decreased the amount of Blue and Red within the low lights. I then extracted some of the green tones from the highlights and added more green within the lowlights.

This then made the sky a moody purple colour and the grass became greener and more extravagant in depth of colour.

As there were too many graves within the image I extracted some using the clone tool which left me with a row of graves within the foreground of the image which is exactly what I was hoping for.

I uploaded another photograph of which I took of myself in the pose that I wanted 'Queen Mary' to be in and what clothes I wanted her to wear. I then selected myself and cut>paste in new layer onto the image of the church.

This then was transported onto my background. However, as you can see, the image of 'Mary' has really rough edges and so I used the 'rubber' tool in order to crop all of the excess image that I didn't need.

From this I then blurred the edges of 'Mary' as I wanted her to appear almost ghost-like.

For the 'silver bells' I took a photograph of a snow drop inwhich I then cut>paste into new layer onto my final outcome and then placed it into the hand of 'Queen Mary'. I had to adjust the brightness of the snowdrop as it was too bright for the background.

My final image:

'Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

how does your garden grow?

with silver bells and cockle shells

and pretty maids all in a row'.

I wanted the influences of Tim Burton to shine through my photographs and I think that I have managed to do this quite well with the dark, death-like atmosphere of the sky and dark tones and shades of the church behind.
I decided to change the composition of the photograph from that of my sketch as I thought that on the background of the picture a church would be more suitable for the photograph rather than a forest-like appearence within my sketch, I chose the church as I think it links better with the silver bells and the catholic religion of Queen Mary, Bloody Mary.