Photocollage: 9 to 5 Sermon Slide

It's funny how people think differently about things - here are basic ideas I offered for this week's sermon title slide:

And here's what Pastor countered with from a google image search:

I loved the idea of the hand reaching out from the pile of wadded papers with a help sign - and he wasn't opposed to it, so I was off.

This is the first time I've been bold enough to ask for someone to help me with source pictures. Pastor did a great job and sent me come pictures but they weren't quite what I wanted so I took a few too. Pastor and my boss were hand models - used the sleeve from pastor's pics and the hand from my boss's pics, replaced the paper with a picture I took of some crumpled paper, took pics of wadded up paper, worked on shadows and balances and other such and ended up with this:

 

That awesome "help" font is Befn - don't remember now where I got it - might've been one of those stellar Monday freebies that Creative Market sends. The 9 to 5 layout is from the old Dolly Partin movie poster.

Here are two of the main source pics:

The pic and lighting quality was stellar from these that Pastor sent to me, but I didn't communicate well about the paper - wanted a crumpled piece like you see below. The sleeve wasn't long enough for me, but there was enough of it that I cloned and painted an additional section of the jacket sleeve to make me happy then replaced the hand...

I was a terrible photographer and director this week when it came to explaining what I wanted - probably because it surprised me that he said "sure" when I asked if he'd let me photograph his hand. I realized after he'd gone that I wanted the paper to be straighter  in the hand and other such nit picky things that would've made the collage easier to put together... learning new stuff all the time. Anyhow, the angle of his hand was a challenge to make work with the sleeve I had. Also, as you can tell, his arm is hairy - most reference and advertising pics of hands and arms don't have obvious hair so I cleaned that up a little, fixed the levels to brighten it and did some color balancing to better match with Pastor's pic. As I mentioned above, the angle of the paper in his hand wasn't quite right for what I needed. Wish I'd taken a pic of his hand without the paper in it too, and could've made things easier on both of us if I'd had him hold it out in front of him instead of over his head (which even with him sitting down made the angle be off cause I'm short) but my brain was on hiatus.

It was fun gathering my pieces and putting it all together. Learned a few things and hope to do more of this in the future - been getting a bit tired of the usual process and want to start creating my own stock images instead of spending so much time searching for free and open source images.