Combine photos to create surrealist landscapes

How-to
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published

The hyper-real look is back in style. Mike Harrison adds a touch of the surreal in his compositions.

Photo-manipulation has taken many forms over the years. The latest trend involves using several stock images to create a composition. There are a number of techniques that are useful for this, but the most important thing to remember is that you need to pay a great deal of attention to detail if you want to convince the viewer that they're looking at a realistic landscape, no matter how surreal your work becomes.

You can only do this by studying the real world around you to get a feel for the factors that will affect the look of your piece, such as lighting, shadows and colours. This project demonstrates how I combine stock images to construct a landscape, outlining some simple but extremely useful techniques that will help you in your own compositions.

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