Anastasia: Composite

The base image here has actually almost nothing to do with the name Anastasia - it just happened to be made by a DeviantArt user who shares the name with me. All the same, I chose it because it offered me an interesting (and clever, I thought) way to work in the other images. My admiration of Tudor-style architecture was really just an added plus. The other images were favorites culled from a vast number of Romanov portraits and movie posters (though, admittedly, I did use one of each). Beginning with the photograph of the violinist, I chose window or wall panels in the original picture that suited the shapes and sizes of the new ones, and used the Magic Eraser and Background Eraser tools to remove all but the frames. The smaller pictures (some, like the rose at the bottom middle, having needed size editing first) then went in one by one, as new layers beneath the original. I cleaned up messy edges as I went, and once all were in, a few went through Photoshop filters to add some interest. With that done, it seemed to me that the background behind the edited house was too bland, so I went back to a fresh copy of the original picture and erased out the house itself. I put the background through a filter and pasted it over the composite. The text was an afterthought, as I felt the image would be more coherent if my name were actually included in it. The French is a definition - it reads "of Greek origin - she will rise again." (It didn't look as good in English.) Last of all the layers were flattened, and that was that.