This is my entry to the LMAC let's make a collage competition round 116.
When I was creating this art I was imagining a classic fantasy tragic fairy tale. Maybe a sorceress trapped in a cave by a spell gone wrong, doomed forever to stare out on the world living among the creatures of the underworld.
As this theme developed in my mind I imagined a guardian of the gateway, a magical creature brought into being by the terrible spell. These ideas developed into the collage elements - the goblin hiding behind the plants near the entrance of the cave and the magical deer waiting by waterfall in the forest pool.
As always though, it wasn't a simple process turning what I saw in my imagination when first looking at 
Creative Process
A lot of time creating this collage was spent doing transparency work and constructing the layers properly to maintain decent perspective between the different elements.
First, I used a combination of the fuzzy select tool and the eraser to remove the entire background landscape in the mouth of the cave to transparent. As the colours in the sorceress' dress were similar to the scene outside the cave, it was impossible to get a good outline around her without using either the paths or eraser tool.
After choosing the two creatures I wanted to add into the image (Goblin and Deer) from the LMAC image library I realised I would need to do some manipulation with layers to make the goblin look like it was peeking from behind the plants.
The only way I knew how to do this was to create another cave image (at the same resolution) with everything transparent other than the plant on the left of the image.
It took a lot of fiddly close work with the eraser tool down to a single pixel at times 😂 but eventually I got it done.
Which allowed me to place the goblin layer below this second cave image layer with only the plant, giving the effect that it was standing behind the fern.
Next, I used the paths tool to meticulously isolate an area around the bigger deer in the original image of two posted to the LMAC library by 
Then clicked the 'selection from path' function, hit 'Ctrl & I' to invert the selection and then hit the delete key to delete everything other than the selection to transparent.
There were a few final touches to the image to achieve the magical effect of the art I had envisioned.
First I placed (and resized) the goblin behind the fern, used the 3D transform tool to make it look like he was staring in the sorceress direction.
Then finally I used a bunch of filter on the deer to make it seem to glow with magic. If memory serves me, I used a combination of a bloom, an edge and some colour manipulation all with different levels of opacity, and finally a placed a very subtle supernova light filter effect behind the deer’s forehead region.
Resources Used:
I used two images from the LMAC Image Library for this collage, and sourced one from pixabay:
 Contributed to the #LIL by @marcybetancourt. |  Contributed to the #LIL by @eve66. |
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 's LMAC Competition Image |  Image by Stine86Engel on Pixabay |
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I hope you have enjoyed this escape into a fairy tale world.
Thanks for reading.
All image sources in this post are CC licence made using GIMP Photo Editing Suit. I have set 
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