M2 CP / Photomontage Image Hijack

For my Photomontage assignment, I decided to settle on the tourist concept from my sketches. I wanted to play on the classic tourist photography trope of using tricks of perspective to appear large in relativity to world landmarks. I think it is a cheeky and absurd image hijack concept to defeat the purpose of the gimmick by simply editing a photo of myself over a piece of architecture as if I were trying to fool people on social media into believing I was well-traveled. When I spotted a painting of a Venetian public square called the Piazza San Marco, I came up with the idea to pose myself as a misinformed wanna-be tourist who mixed up the Piazza with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and tried to pose as if she were trying to hold up a building that is standing perfectly upright.  

 https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.125646.html
The Piazza San Marco, 1874. Rudolf Von Alt.

Me, 2024. My Roommate Alex.

To edit myself out of the original picture of me, I used the magic wand tool to remove the background, and went in with the eraser to tidy up the edges. To match the colors of the painting, I added a few layers of reduced contrast and higher brightness, an overlay of a dry paint texture from Adobe Stock, I used the color balance tool to higher the levels of red and yellow, added a warming filter, and used the threshold feature to flatten some of the fine details and make my skin resemble the painting's textures more. I needed to resize and skew the image a bit to pose myself correctly. 

In retrospect, I do think it would have been better to get the photograph at a lower angle to match the angle of the painting's composition.