These are not products of my vanity, rather an exercise in photo-manipulation. I have cut the eyes out of a picture of our cat Padstow and put them in one of me. With a bit of judicious feathering, I thought the result was quite effective, given that it was a very quick job. The version above was cropped and had a caption with drop shadow added. Look on the Xara Xtreme Pro CD for the “general photo composition” demo movie to see how it was done.
Above is a Klimt jpeg that I bitmap traced, reduced to wireframe and placed above a copy of the original, with linear transparency on the top version so the lower shows through gradually. There, clear as mud. It is sort of supposed to be a take on Painting by Numbers. The Xara Xone has a useful article on bitmap tracing here.
This one took slightly longer because I had to draw with the shape editor tool around pictures of Esme and Padstow which I then resized and placed over a background image I downloaded from the internet. There is a link to royalty-free stock images on the Xara Xone front page. Egg has very good You Tube video on “Extracting Part of a Photo”.
This took 12 minutes to create once I had the basic idea. It’s all about me, isn’t it?