When I first started this project I had originally decided to go with a poem called Fire and Ice by Robert Frost. However, no matter how hard I tried I simply could not come up with an idea that excited me. I wanted to do something maybe with dragons and knights but couldn't get anything to work. I cut this knight out with a layer mask and soft brush because I felt like the hard brush was far more noticeable and the soft brush kinda flowed with the knight's armor.

Eventually after giving up on my first poem I decided to go with a poem called "A Poison Tree" by William Blake. I found a suitable background that I thought I might be able to turn into something more interesting and connecting with my poem.

I then found an image of an old man on a park bench looking gloomy and depressed which I thought would go nicely with the dark theme of my image background and the poem.

I ended up making it work and turned the images to black and white. I then added some fog with my brush to try and make it more unique. I then resized the old man by the bench to have him more orientated next to the tree. But, after a lot of contemplating I decided it wasn't the picture that I wanted it to be and decided to scrap both the finished image and the poem and start over.

I did some more research on poets and their respective poems and stumbled across "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Coleridge. The stanza is, "

The crew says that the Albatross is responsible for the fog and

then that the Albatross is responsible for the wind that keeps their

boat moving." So I decided to go with a ship at sea type idea and wanted it to be kind of eery like my last attempts so I found this wonderful picture of the sea at night with some lightning and moonlight behind it.

After playing around with some filters and tools I turned it into more of a painting rather than picture and immediately loved it. It made it more unique and personal to me. I went to filters and enabled Palette knife which gave it the painting look that I was going for.

I then added a modern warship, cut it out using a layer mask and applied it. From there I enabled the Palette Knife from the filter gallery to have it match the background

From here I wanted to incorporate the seagulls that the sailors were almost idolizing but I did not just want to simply plop them in there with no connection to the ship so I decided to add a silhouette of a sailor pointing up at the seagull in aw and excitement which I cut out using the magic wand tool. I did this to tie the whole scene together into one rather than several unassociated parts. With the darker silhouettes I also added the Palette Knife filter from the filter gallery but it is far less noticeable. As well on this step I used my stamp tool on the ocean layer and copied the area where the ocean and ship meet to get as close of a match as possible. I then used that copied area to slowly paste it over the very bottom of the ship to connect the sea and ship and make it look like the bottom of the ship is submerged. I did this several times to get the end result. I pasted the stamp tools on the ship to a blank layer above the ship so that if need be I could simply disable that layer if I messed up too much.

From there I positioned both the seagulls and the sailor in spots I felt flowed best with the image. I ended up using a soft brush and hard brush together to cut out small parts of the sailors waist and the seagulls feet on the radio tower to really give the viewer the impression that they are on the boat.

I then added some more sailors just to give the image a little life and action going on. I cut them out the same way as before using the magic wand and erasing very small pixels of color from the original background.

Finally, to incorporate the fog from the poem into the image and really give it that eery effect I was going for I added some fog with my brush on a separate layer to give it that little extra detail.