I created this portrait for my husband Blaise and gave it to him for Christmas 2019. We both love music, especially live music. Blaise introduced me to the love of music when we first met in college. He had a huge collection of albums in his dorm room, while I only owned a few. In this portrait I surrounded him with lyrics from pieces of his favorite songs, and memorable ones from our 35+ years together.

Blaise knows the lyrics to every song he's ever heard and loved. I knew he would recognize each song even if only a few lines were written. I lost count of how many songs are represented here. The background is a composite of photos from concerts we've seen in the past couple of years.

I started the old school way with paper and scissors, and a 28" x 22" sheet of construction paper. A photo of Blaise was printed on a cheap office printer as a starting point, and taped to the construction paper. I knew I would replace the photo digitally in Photoshop, so I wasn't concerned at all about the quality of the print.

Each of the ribbons of paper were loosely freehand cut without drawing or pre planning the composition. The ribbons were taped to the larger board, again without too much concern for neatness because I knew I could clean everything up in Photoshop later.

I used Spotify and Google to find songs and song lyrics, and spent four nights hand writing the lyrics on the ribbons. I mostly picked pieces of songs that would fit in the space provided. Some songs are represented by just a few words, and others are complete stanzas. 

After I completed filling in all of the ribbons with lyrics I photographed the composition with my studio lights. I placed rolled up pieces of tape behind the ribbons in different places to create a more three dimensional look. I knew I would be able to use the cast shadows to create depth when I got the image into Photoshop.

Some of my handwriting got smudged on the scotch tape, so I spent time cleaning up all of the smudges and hand writing mistakes in Photoshop.

I used Adobe Dimension to create a three dimensional background from our collection of concert photos. All of these photos were captured with iPhones. I could have created this background in Photoshop, but I used Dimension to easily apply depth of field, drop shadows, concert style lighting, and texture on the images.

I used Adobe Dimension again to create the music notes. A flattened version of the composite was placed as an image background in Dimension. This gave me a guide to position the notes. Dimension rendered the notes on their own layer which made it really easy to move into the final portrait composite.

The photo of Blaise was masked and placed into position in Photoshop. I didn't plan well for the ribbon tucking under his left hand, so I had to use Photoshop to reposition those lyrics. 

Overall the Photoshop stage of this composite came together very easy. The final composite was printed at the same size as the original construction paper, mounted on foam core and framed in black without glass.

The gift was a surprise and enthusiastically received.