www-walrus.blogspot.com: WW449 how FredOfDee created his entry

the source:

how FredOfDee worked:
Well, I managed to carefully clip out the Source, turn the shade upside down, and fill in the "cuts" it made into the whale/ sea-wave/ moustache-shaped "wings".
Then I managed to orient the original to the inverted Source, copy-merged and paste as a new layer. Applied a "gentle" brush effect once again, gentler than I used on the Telephone Source in WW447.

That was the easy part (though it took me all day Monday).

Now what do I do?

Well, I tried this texture background along with that; nope. Tried another set of them; nope. And so it went.

Then I ran across this scan of a "floral still life" painting, and thought that would look best as a backdrop -- Hard Light layer-blended against a "fading rainbow gradient" flood-filled canvas.

Tried to make some home-made pedestals for the lampshades, but they looked cheap and out of place. Google to the rescue: came up with these Cupid Pedestals with a round platter angled much the same as the Source's mounting thingie (mounting base?) Selected that platter, angled it a bit more to match the angle of the Source's base mount, then resized and positioned it to fit under the Source. Duped it and repeated the resize- and-fit process for the other Source. Last:
Adjust-cleaned (noise, etc.) and darkened them both a bit.

Selected around the "light-emitting" edge of each lampshade, flaring the selection a bit to the edge of the WP, and then lightened it with a dash of Highlight-Midtone-Shadow, to create the illusion of soft light beaming from inside the lampshade. Took me a while to think of that trick. Then did it again because I didn't have a wide enough feather-edge on the light beam -- it's now a 10-pixel feather-edge instead of 3...for a softer, more "diffuse" edge.

Then I tried this logo-type image and that flower-type image as one extra add-in, tried an Asian Fashion Model or two; nope, nope, nope,
and nope.

Oh bother.

Then I ran across this Fantasy Art portrait of a beautiful face I'd DL'd recently from ABAmp; cut a black mask for it to keep the background from showing through her face, and then Lighten layer-blended her into the background. That took a couple of tries, repositioning and resizing to this and that, and finally wound up with this result.
She reminds me of Mother Nature or a Josephine Wall painting...

Added and layer-blended a title (changed from "Double Standard") and such, tried it on my display as WP, looked it over for a while...