Oh, it cracks me up every time I write this, which turns out is fairly often, but AVID readers of this blog -- get it... avid... we don't have any avid readers of this blog! -- know I love doing pet photography composite work. It's really fun because you can put a dog or a cat in a situation they would never be in. Then you put in the minute details to sell the whole of it. I did another one tonight based on the artist rafy A's Surreal Fantasy Manipulation Tutorial.

Now for those avid readers, you might recall another pet photography composite I did back in March called Luna at Sea. I still love that one but it's completely different. Just go back and forth between the two of them, you'll see. I'll wait here...

You see? So for Phoebe at Sea, I didn't want to make a carbon copy of rafy's. At first, I thought Phoebe should be floating on a red umbrella, a little surreal. Didn't work. Then I tried a boat. I'd done that, didn't want to do it again right now, not for this one. Then I remembered I had access to some shipping crates and that was the ticket.

So I put together my tale of Phoebe. It dawned on me as I was creating this one that a lot of my work, especially my personal digital art, is melancholic. Sad. Mysterious. I like when the animals are looking away. They're looking at something we can't see, we don't know. But they are reacting to it. And they're in a mysterious situation. What is it? How did they get there? That's kind of what I love about the ones I create for myself, the open ended aspect of it. You know, when a songwriter says, Oh, I don't want to say what it means, I want everyone to have their own interpretation. I hate that! I want to know, don't you? But with these, I do want to leave it ambiguous. I want you to come up with a story of how Phoebe ended up in a sea in a crate with other crates floating around her.

All I can say for sure, everyone gets out alive and is happy. Because I love my happy endings. I insist.

Oh, you insist on a Storytelling Session? Give me a call, 818.481.5214. What story will your pet tell?