I liked Christina’s effort to fat cat a Sandra Bernhardt painting – she mentioned wanting to get the cat in the hands in place of the goblet but running into frustration in GIMP.

I knew how to do it in Photoshop but thought it was time to try the tool my students likely would use. The trick here is to layer up some elements we would want to appear above the cat, e.g. her hands (I really should have done her lower arm.

First is using the lasso selection tool to copy and cut out her hands

And then past these into a new layer this is key! Next we go back to the base layer, and use the clone tool to fill in the spaces left behind. What you do here is control click on an adjacent source area, and paint in an area you want to cover. IMHO, successful cloning (magic brush in Photoshop) is the magic juice for mashing up images.

Any how, this background ia ideal because of its mottled texture, so with cloning we go from

to

Next we open/paste in the fat cat, and use the lasso to select the body

We use Select-> INvert to make it select everything but the cat, and then Cut to remove the background:

After this, I move, scale, and rotate the kitty to place into her hands. Note that this layer is still on top, so it is above her hands:

If we move this layer down one notch, the hands are now on top of the cat

I notice the fingers are weird, so I want to remove the portions from the top left:

I then do some more clone brushing to copy the texture of the middle two fingers, and extend her fingers, and also clone the top of the top finger.

The basic principle is to figure out the stacking order of layers to show/hide things in the same way they would appear in physical space. Here is my final cat:

It’s taking a bit of getting accustomed to the interface, but I have seen pretty much the same tools I use in Photoshop, just need to fumble around more with the selection tools.