With apologies to Maurice Sendak, author of the award-winning children' book
Where The Wild Things Are.
Weird Decorations #2: Wild Things! by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
In this scene, the impression that the characters from the book have been very very bad is entirely intentional.
The figures used in this picture are plastic statues which I'd forgotten that I had since they were hidden in a box in the basement from many years ago. They are propped up on a table in the living room, and about 30 long exposure photographs were taken in the dark with different parts of the scene illuminated with a small flashlight. Most of the pictures were then imported into Gimp, as layers, and bits of them were blended together with the help of layer masks. That is the basics of this kind of light painting. The method is actually not very difficult, although this one took longer because of the number of pictures taken, and there were additional steps in post-processing which made this more fussy than usual.
If you zoom in closely on the picture, you will see that there are lots of details that cannot be seen otherwise. It is easily the most intricate picture I've done.
Here are various items which may or may not be of interest.
1. If you zoom in, you will see lots of fur and feather textures. These were done in Gimp with various filter effects. They are not "real" since the statues did not have that much detail.
2. Except for the boy, the eyes of the other characters are the eyes of various animals that were added later. For example, the first creature has eyes from an owl. The eyes of "Goat boy" in the rear came from a dog.
3. The boys' torch is actually a Lego piece, and the enlarged receptacle at the end is a Lego-man head.
4. The fire in the torch is from a picture.
5. The background is from various pictures of forest fires, blurred to various degrees and blended together.
6. In case you were wondering the ground is an old bath towel.
Thanks for looking!
With apologies to Maurice Sendak, author of the aw... (