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Jan Thornhill's I Found a Dead Bird
Photo-Illustrations - Step-by-Step
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The Idea Since I Found a Dead Bird is a children's book about death - normally a pretty dreary topic - I wanted to make it as upbeat and exciting as possible, and one of the ways to do that was to use lots and lots of photographs. But when you're designing a book like this, you have to pay for the use of other people's photos and that can be very expensive. Also, there were some things I wanted to put in the book that no one has photographs of at all! So I had to get creative and make digital photo-illustrations. Digital photo-illustrations are basically fancy collages that I create on my computer. For the page "Trapped in Time" (above), I wanted to use a fabulous picture I found on the Internet of the tusks of a mammoth called Jarkov sticking out of the snow in Siberia. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find the photographer to ask if I could use it - and you always have to get permission to use other people's work. That's when I knew I had to make my own "photograph." |
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The Process
![]() Finding Pictures to Use
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Cleaning, Floating & Coloring
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Assembling
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Next I “buried” the
tusks. I did this by carefully erasing the parts I didn’t want to show. |
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To make the tusks look more realistic, I had to invent shadows. I used the shadow of the rock on the left as a a guide for positioning and coloring the tusk shadows. I also added highlights to the tusks and made their color more blue to blend with the scene. When all that was done, I made white airbrush whips of blowing snow over the whole thing... | ![]() |
...and, voila!
My "realistic" photo-illustration of Siberian mammoth tusks was done! |
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