Photoshop: Hannah Hoch

We were given the task of creating something inspired by Hannah Hoch, I chose to recreate their piece called "Strauss" using my own pictures. 

My photoshop recreation/ inspired piece, using photos I have taken.

To start I looked through the photos on my phone and chose ones which I thought would be appropriate. This included lots of flower photos, some photos that contained eyes (mostly photos of me and my cats, since I thought it would be weird using other peoples eyes without their permission) and also a picture of a giraffe standing next to a tree (I used the tree for the sticks/stems at the bottom).

After this I copied the original "Strauss" into photoshop and adjusted the canvas size so that it was the same size. I then used the Eyedropper tool to select the two main colours of the background and used them to create a gradient (Using the gradient tool) for the background. I then started using the Polygonal Lasso Tool to cut out parts of my photos to recreate the piece. I organised the layers using folders. For some of the parts of the original I didn't have any photos that matched, for example the yellow climbing flowers; for this I used a photo of some red hanging leaves and tried to make them look yellow, this didn't turn out too well but I think parts like this make my piece unique from the original since I wasn't aiming for a perfect recreation. Some of the cut out parts are black and white, so I did this in my piece too. To recreate the wire? at the bottom I cut out a metal stick from one of the flower photos and then warped it so that it looks similar. Another thing I included was the signature at the bottom right. Overall I'm quite happy with my piece, even though there are some small mistakes and differences I think it looks quite similar to the original.

Strauss by Hannah Hoch [1965] (Strauss, 1965 - Hannah Hoch - WikiArt.org)