Tuesday, July 6, 2021

A Collage of My Dad and Brother at the Lake


It was a beautiful party for my mother's 90th birthday.  I agonized over what to get her.  What do you get someone who has everything... except dad?  So I created this collage using the old footage of my dad and baby brother at the lake in the 1960s.

Step 1.  I started by isolating just the frame of the footage I wanted.  That wasn't easy.  The footage was originally shot in 8mm and then an uncle had projected it onto a screen and setting up a VHS camcorder, shot footage of the movie playing against the screen.  The VHS tape doesn't freeze nicely like a digital video would but I did the best I could.

Step 2.  Then I drew the picture and tweaked it as best I could to get a likeness before covering the background with blues for the water.  To keep the likeness of my dad and brother, I traced them onto tracing paper.

Step 3.  I then began to layer colored paper onto the tracking paper, working to get just the right light and shadow areas.  It doesn't matter if you use orange for a face color if the values are in the right place.

Step 4.  After gluing the tracing paper down against the water, I added words and pictures that I thought would add to the composition.

All done.  

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