Weeping Angel
The photograph you see on the left is not a real old photo. Most people spend hours, working with Photoshop or GIMP to restore old images. I set about making a modern photo old and tatty. I saw this photo on line, and decided that what was needed was a head to finish it off. So, I cut up the photo, and extended upwards, so that there would me enough room for a head.
I had already given Karen Gillan, the new Doctor Who actress the treatment, so whose head to use next? It had to be young and pretty, after all, if I was going to be spending so much time staring at a face, should be an attractive one. I decided to use a photo of Jaime McDonald from one of her Facebook albums. Turning Jaime, my friend Mel Hill’s 20 year old daughter into a demure Victorian was so ironic. She is such an active and outgoing twenty-first century young woman. It has to be said that I doubt that even Jaime would be very boisterous in dress that required her to wear a corset to squeeze her waist down to 23 inches and then a bustle that would make her skirt stick out an additional foot or two behind her. Victorian women had to be demure. They were so terrified of being caught doing anything ungainly or unfeminine that they wore this sort of restrictive clothing that prevented them from really do anything at all.
First things first, the dress was squashed and stretched a bit so that it was the right length for Jaime’s height. On the right is Jaime’s head from the base photo above her face after she had been given a nineteenth century makeover. This makeover consisted of getting rid of the make up, as a Victorian lady would never contemplate wearing any, and her skin had to be made more “pail and interesting”. Then the hair had to be manipulated, because adult women wore their hair up, and had lots more of it. I struck on the notion of cutting her hair from the rest of her head,and using that, once suitably shrunk too form the bun on the top of her head. This mask also supplied the hair on either side of the face, once I had cut away some of the detail of the modern hairstyle.
Once the head was in place I realised that she didn’t have any hands, so I trawled the Internet for a suitable picture of Jaime from Facebook to get the hands.
I decided to get a bit artistic. I applied some filters, first to give the photo a bit of a rough edge, then to make it Sepia and give it a speckled old photo look. A large chunk of the work I had done matching the seems suddenly meant nothing because the filters blurred the image slightly and took away some of the contrast as well as the colour. Still the image didn’t quite look right. So used another filter to add some artistic stains and painted on a couple of folds. That was it, or so I thought. The image still wasn’t right, for whilst the Victorians might all have had a smile as lovely as Jaime’s, you never get to see them in old photos. The reason being that it would be impossible to hold a proper smile during the long exposure times the cameras of the day needed. So back to Facebook for a picture of Jaime with pursed lips, to tack onto the image, once it had been treated to look suitably old.
Then a few days later, it struck me that despite my previous efforts, Jaime’s head was about 15% to large for the body I had attached it to. So more manipulation was required to make it smaller. This made the details on the face even less precise. Oh well it was a small price to pay for the final image.
I sent Jaime a copy of this photo, with the subject line on the email, “you shouldn’t have blinked”, a reference to the Doctor Who story Blink, a reference that she was bound to recognise. It struck me, what if she thinks I am a bit weird, spending so much time manipulating her face, and without permission. Fortunately, it is easier to gain forgiveness than permission, and Jaime liked the finished item. Although sensibly she ignored my suggestion that she should use it as her Facebook Profile Picture.








