We Are Stardust

"We are stardust, we are golden,
We are ten billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."

From the song "Woodstock", Music and Lyrics by Joni Mitchell
As sung by Joni [link]
As sung by CSN&Y [link]


This one went fairly quickly, born from a seed that was planted a few days ago, evolving as it grew.
I hope you like it

EDIT October 14: A late dedication to who graciously permitted me to submit this for Prints. Thank you, dear heart.


Download is 4000 x 3000


Background [link] Nebula [link] and Central Nebular Glow [link] by =Moonchilde-Stock
Black Hole [link] by ~Fune-Stock
Starchild [link] by *sempiterna-stock

For those who "want to know" :

I did two or three dry runs to make sure the elements would fit together, first. Then, I did the full cut-out on the model. That was the most time consuming act in this.

I opened the background, then opened the "black hole" (which is really an Eclipse) as a layer. Doing so automatically centers that layer. I next *picked* the center color and sent it to the Alpha channel, erasing that color from the layer and leaving all of that space transparent and creating major translucence throughout the rest of it, thereby allowing the background to show through completely.

I, next, opened the model cutout as a layer and re-sized her by half. The re-size amount was arbitrary, and 50% was what worked. Then, came the Thiessen Nebula layer, which I re-sized upwards a bit.

Finally. the Wings of Love layer, which I did two or three Gaussian Blurs on, with the blur set to maximum. A soft edged brush, set to erase and expanded to full size, was used on the edges of that layer to eliminate the hard edge left over from maximum blurring.

Adjust tint, layer size, tone, saturation, contrast, lightness, and transparency of each layer to get the desired effect, and it is done. Add the watermark, color it and adjust transparency, save it as is, then flatten the whole thing and save it as a JPG.

Including the time spent to scratch the dog, get fresh coffee, have a smoke, and give the eyes frequent time-outs to eliminate the ghost-image effect: First dry-run to completion (which, for me, includes pre-typing all of the stock info for cut-and-paste into the comment section...thus requiring logging on and looking each piece up and correctly typing the info) took about 4-4 1/2 hours, maybe a few minutes more.

Then, it is time to post it and notify the stock providers. Voila!

Of course, I used the GIMP and my Intuos3.

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