Portraits from the undersea ball

In coming up with decorating projects for the undersea Halloween ball, I figured it might be fun to do something with these nine picture frames on our living room wall. The images we have in there normally are already slightly spooky — eight of them are weird black and white postcards from the medical history museum in Berlin, and then I made a deer skull graphic for the big oval frame in the middle. (You can see them in this post about our apartment.) So last year we just left them alone for the party.

This year, for the nautical theme, I had the idea of Photoshopping some old-timey photos of the ship's crew and displaying them in the frames. I started with the idea of our pet rabbits as the captain and first mate, and then added me and Marjorie as the hosts of the ball, and then our friend Audrey who's visiting from Paris for Halloween, and then my buddy Francisco, since he had told me a while back that he wanted to do up a steampunk costume for our party so he could be the ship's engineer. We had asked our friends Heather and Mike to help out with the party, so they got a spot in one of the frames too. At that point I'd pretty much run out of people who were directly involved in the party, so I decided to fill up the last frame with just a generic picture of a (zombified) ship's crew and stick that one way up out of the way where nobody would really look like it.

Anyway, the project involved lots and lots of Google image searching and lots of Photoshopping. I really enjoy this kind of work and I kept wanting to add more and more stuff to all these things. Seeing as how these would be printed out pretty dark and displayed in a pretty dark room, I knew I could get away with being a little bit sloppy with the details, so that's probably a little more visible when you're looking at these online.



For Acide and Kyubi, I just Googled old sea captains and sailors and Photoshopped their heads on.
( See the rest after the cut!Collapse )