Massage

This is another one of my early attempts. At first, when I started figuring out how to make collages, I would burn through them as quickly as possible, and once I was done, I would file them away and not look at them anymore.

After a while however, I started to go back to look at my old work and I started to pick them apart for lighting errors, poor technique and so on. Those that I were dissatisfied with, I would try and fix. This was one of them. This was maybe my third or fourth collage, and there were lots of little details that annoyed me, such as really jagged cutting and lousy shadow work. The image also suffered from a badly compressed source with lots of noise. Luckily, I think I managed to come up with something better from what was there in the first attempt.

I also learned a valuable lesson from going back and fixing old collages. Never ever merge your layers in your working file, even if you think you're done with it and you want to save space.