(Will be edited in the next few days.) Final Entry! Huzzah!

Well, I have exhausted what I want out of my final piece. I think that it has gone well, actually. I would upload some of my many failed images, but to be honest, I deleted them in my furious rage to complete the project. My portfolio shows the piece at every step of the process, so no worries there.

Along the way, I certainly came across several problems.

Swapping Backgrounds/foregrounds -
I wanted to cut and paste many objects. I needed to be very careful in my image selections. It can be very difficult taking the foreground out of images, and so I made sure to choose pictures with very consistent backgrounds or foregrounds. This allowed me to swap the backgrounds of many of my images and it helped me in almost all of my steps.

Overlapping Images -
When I swapped the foregrounds of the images into the main background, I ran into an unfortunate problem. Many of my images that needed to appear in the background overlapped into the foreground. This does not look good when you have a moon that is closer to the viewer than a fence. Instead of panicking and forcing myself into a four hour code lock down, i decided to simply move the elements. I knew I would not be able to pull off a layering effect, and so I only strategically placed the images. The moon is right between the fence and other elements fit in perfectly as well. To make the moon look even more distant, I blended the original background back over the moon. This gave the moon a faded blue appearance, just what I wanted!

Mirroring:
Some of the images I wanted to use were not facing in the right direction. To mirror them entirely, I placed them into a large canvass. Next I mirrored the whole canvas. This helped me reverse images.

Coloring:
After everything I managed to complete, I still struggled on even really simple things. For example, I really wanted to try to color code certain all black images. I, for the life of me, could not do it. I wanted to add more color into the final piece, but I decided that it was not worth the effort. I also wanted to add a tree and see if I could try to give it a gradient with the same colors as the sunset. In the end, I had to scratch that idea.

In the end, I can say that I am definitely satisfied. I had a lot of different plans, and this one was one that I finally managed to capitalize on. I worked on the actual coding for close to 6 hours or so. (It spent the whole day working on it.) Getting the idea into place required that I actually write down steps on paper and include illustrations to help me picture the final piece. I cannot say that I found or created anything especially significant in the finished creation. For me to get so deep into what I compulsively created would be an outright fabrication.

New Plan, (for real this time!)

Okay, my last idea was lame. This new plan will be tons better, and hopefully not as difficult. I will also have to use a lot of different tools to pull it off.  I will use a variant of the swap background and foreground code. I will use blend to try to make certain items look as if they are in the background. I will also try to use mirror techniques and scaling to fix images for how I would like to use them. My background image is this:

 I will add a city on the right side of the horizon:

 This city image will have to be cropped and changed to not include the red text and the blue sky. That will not be a problem. Placing it into the background will not be difficult, the only issue is the fence in the foreground of the background. The city will appear in front of the fence, and I want it to appear as if it is behind the fence. I will try to blend the city again over the original to see if I can create a layering effect. If that works out, I will also use the same layering technique for some other objects.

Like a moon.

And If I can manage to crop this image to only include the vapor trail, I would love to place copies of this into the top left of the background. Hopefully it can all turn out.