This piece was done for my final assignment for my Digital Art module. The theme was "A Singapore Fantasy Christmas", and we were supposed to take a photograph of a landmark in Singapore, put a person from a different photograph into it and make it look real. My idea was to put a Santarina on top of the Fullerton Hotel.
Here in Singapore, we have Christmas decorations along Orchard Road, which is our shopping district. There is actually a competition for the best decorated shopping centre. This picture played on that a little, making the Santarina a "decoration" for the Fullerton. I'm sure the Fullerton would have won if this were real (I should try to send this picture to the papers or something).
This is the first time I'm doing any photo compositing. After deciding on the idea, I couldn't get anyone to pose for me, and I didn't have a santarina outfit either. My teacher suggested that I looked for different pictures and cut and paste the body parts and put them together to get the picture I wanted. I was fortunate enough to find several photographs of the same Asian santarina taken by a Singaporean photographer. The stock photos cost me 9 USD, but I got the body parts I needed and was thus able to "frankenstein" the girl for my piece (hence the title "Frankerina"). The clavicle area is a dead giveaway.
The other challenge was to change a daytime photograph to a night scene. Lots of repainting of the lights was needed and that was really troublesome. I had to cut out some of the lighting which Fullerton normally has behind the "Merry Christmas" so there will be enough contrast for the words. The office lights had to be repainted, the street lights, the car lights, the highlights on the buildings, road and plants. If you look closely enough, I painted the green traffic light wrongly. It's supposed to be the bottom light. The top one is supposed to be red.
And here are the original photographs used in the picture (except for the sky):
