For my picture of Alice in the talking garden, I started by determining from the story which flowers I wanted to include, and decided on a rose, a tiger-lily, daffodils, daisies, a larkspur, some violets, and an orchid. I found pictures of each type of flower online (see sources below).

For the background, I tried to build my own field using patterns and textures to make grass in order to build the garden from scratch, but I could not get it to look lush enough for the scene I envisioned. Therefore I decided to start with a base picture of an already-existing flower garden and add my flowers into it. For the most part, I left the background image I chose relatively unchanged, but I did use the clone stamp and smudge tools to remove the logo in the bottom of the picture and to remove one of the hyacinths that was cluttering the final product.

I decided I wanted Alice to be laying down in a field of flowers for the picture, so I searched for pictures of blonde girls until I found someone in the right pose. After trying many different versions, I finally settled on a girl lounging on a chair. I liked this version best because she was pouting, and I always felt like Alice was completely frustrated by the time she made it to the garden. I cut her out from the rest of the picture and placed her in the center of the background. To make her stand out a bit from the rest of the flowers, I gave her a drop shadow using the blending options for the layer.

Next I cut each of the flowers out of the picture they were in using the polygonal lasso and the magic wand tools. I placed them on the background, rearranging frequently until I felt the colors were balanced and the "talking" flowers stood out from the flowers that were just part of the background filler.

To make the faces on the flowers, I used pictures of friends and family that I had taken. The one exception to this was the rose. I felt her personality was so strong and downright rude that I would not have a picture to convey the proper expression, so I searched for pictures of rude faces and used the image I liked best as the face of the rose. I cut her face out using the polygonal lasso tool, pasted it onto the rose, and used the transform tool to scale it down and rotate and skew it to fit the proportions of the rose. I then used the color replacement tool to make the face be the same color scheme as the rest of the rose so it would blend in. I made the layers for the rose a set so that I could easily move and adjust the rose and face at the same time.

I used a similar technique for the larkspur, tiger lily, all of the daffodils, and the daisies, although for these I used pictures of friends and family. I wanted to give each of the flowers a different personality and attitude, so I used pictures of friends’ babies for all of the daisies to make them young and innocent. I then added a duplicate layer for each of the daisies and gave them shadows, bevels, and glows to make the faces stand out against the rest of the picture. I used a picture of a friend dressed in dapper clothing for the larkspur to make her playful and elegant, and a crazy picture of Adam to show the tiger-lily’s flamboyance. For some reason I decided daffodils are near sighted so all of the faces of the daffodils are friends and family wearing glasses.

I tried at first to use the same technique on the orchid, the violet, and the pansy, but the faces ended up overwhelming the details of the flower. In the end, I decided to cut apart the face and paste in the eyes and mouth as separate details. I had to adjust the individual eyes many times to make them line up in a way that looked true to the flower (though not necessarily true to the shape of the face of the person in the original picture). On the yellow flower, when I turned the lips yellow the detail of the pursed lips was lost, so I decided to leave some color in and keep the lips red.

Finally I wanted to convey the idea that while these flowers all look pretty, they all have attitudes. I also wanted to fill something in the top left of the picture, as it had too much "green space". In the end, I decided to paste in some text from the story that got the message across in one quick line. I used the "warp text" tool to put the text in a flag formation to make it fit.

You can also view the photoshop file of this image.