I'm co-teaching a digital landscape class at Art Center this semester. The idea is to go to a location and take photos, draw, make color sketches in order to return to the computer lab and with photoshop create a new image inspired by the information collected on location. Last week we went to Descanso Gardens between rain showers, and I took all sorts of photos from all different vantage points, close ups, distant shots. I had the idea that I wanted to make a composition inspired by some of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel with all sorts of nooks and crannies, foreground versus distance and a certain breadth to the scene. So today I was at the lab at school and in about four hours collaged all my different photos into an entirely new compostion; I added a few other photos cut and pasted from the internet for the building and characters, gave the piece a more coherent light and shadow arrangement and color scheme and this is what I came up with. I think the whole Asian theme came from the Japanese tea garden at Descanso. It's fun to work digitally again, reminds me of the old video game days! And photoshop is such an awesome tool for composing pictures! An interesting note regarding the photo reference, the mountain, rocks and trees that the pagoda is on is a low-angle close up shot of a bonsai arrangement near the entrance to the gardens... it was so cool looking I knew I wanted it somewhere in my piece.