My Little Pony: Working My Magic

So last Monday I put up a post showing my photoshop mash-up of a dragon fighting an AT-AT. If you missed that post, click here. Well, I asked if anyone had a request for me to make a photoshop mash-up of their own imagination. My Mom responded with this:

Ok, well, you said we could request a mash-up picture. So here's my request: a meadow with horses, but one of the horses has to be from "My Little Pony". Also, include a boxer dog somewhere in the pic and a palm tree, too! Ha! Have fun! :) Are you going to post my requested pic on this blog?

Wow! I don't know where she came up with this, but I figured I would do my best. So, I searched around and found a good background to my photo.

original photo

It is a nice open meadow with plenty of room to add in the photoshops. Next, I decided in what pose to have the "My Little Pony" character. I used to watch a show on our TV called
"My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." It was a favorite of mine for a while, I would watch it every Saturday when it came on. Anyways, this show is what I decided to pull my character from; her name is Applejack, and she is the owner of an apple orchard.

(Sorry if the photo is blurry; it was larger when I found it and then I shrunk it.)

 Applejack has to get her apples off the trees somehow,  and she does not have hands, so she likes to kick the trees and every apple will fall off perfectly into a bucket. Thus, I decided to have Applejack interacting with the palm tree Mom requested. I would have the pony kicking coconuts off of a palm tree. So, the next step is finding a palm tree.

This was the tree I chose; it is slightly edited in that I have added the coconuts to the tree. I know, it sounds as if it would be easier to find a tree with coconuts already on it, but it is apparently very hard to find a suitable photo for a mash-up like this. So, I took the coconuts off another tree like this:

and put them on my tree. I then put the tree in a nice spot in the background, like this:

and I added in some coconuts at the bottom for depth. I will add in all the other components at the end, but I added in the palm tree so I could save it that day, as I had run out of time to work on the project. So, the next component I needed was a boxer dog. She did not say what the dog needed to be doing, and in the end I put two different dogs in the photo. The first one was this:

Cute, right? He was added to the back right at a smaller size to look like he had run down the hill. I moved his pink ball to the creek side, so it would look like he was going to run past the left-most horse. Then, I added in this cute boxer dog:

And "magic wanded" him so it ended up like this:

The edges are rough, but when I shrunk the image and moved it where I wanted him to be, you do not even notice. I was pretty sure the photo was done, so I had someone look at it to make sure I had not missed anything important. Sure enough, they were not quite sure what Applejack was doing, so I added in one more item to make it clear. A bucket! I wanted to take a bucket out of the TV show I used to watch and fill it with coconuts, so I looked around and decided to use this photo.

I cropped most of the photo out, then worked on removing the apples.

I got stuck at this stage for the longest time, because I could remove the apple outlines, but when I tried to add in the coconuts in the bucket, they were not visible because of the layers I had created. FINALLY, after a long time of sitting and staring at the above photo, I figured out to use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select all the apple outlines and cut them from the photo. Now I was free to add in the coconuts.

I took this coconut pile and moved it around and copied it and fit them all how I liked, and ended up with a heaping coconut-filled bucket.

Now I had all the parts and pieces I needed. Add them all in there, with some finishing touches, and my mash-up looked like this: Click the image so it does not look blurry, and so you can see details.

   Definitely had a lot of fun with this project, as I love horses and boxer dogs, and I also learned something new in photoshop, again.
   If you want to see me make a photoshop you have thought up, post it in the comment section below or on Facebook and I will get started on it! Hope you enjoyed!