In 2003 I contacted Catherine McIntyre after finding her figurative art photo montages. I was utterly gobsmacked by her skills not only in photoshop but also in faultless colour harmony and compositional ability. She kindly explained the basic tools I needed to start me off.
I tried occasionally but never did much and found myself doing anything but make a montage. In 2011 I threw everything to one side and vowed to spend a year trying, I took images at random and threw them into layers and tried to blend them in harmony.
Years ago I came across the figurative work of Ann W Brigman who posed nude in the Sierra Nevada in the first decade of the 20th century. This is the 'Soul of the Blasted Pine'.
She was borne in Hawaii in 1869, studied art there, married a sea captain, moved to San Francisco and found photography.
She posed for this image in 1908. Her and friends from the Bay area made many expeditions to the lands east of 'Frisco.
Her work is taught in colleges and universities all over the USA and she is a revered feminist icon.
I tried and failed many times over the years to make figurative images in the landscape.
DAZ3D is a site that gives its Studio software free to anyone who cares to sign up to the site. It comes with some basic nude figures and sells the clothes etc to put on them. I found the site and thought well OK but not very good. I continued to look over the years and the figures got better. With sufficient knowledge of the program new figures can be made from the basic ones and sold, one does need a DAZ licence to do this.
Along came the Genesis3 figure released in 2015 and I found out about it in 2018. I began to make montages using G3F figures created by Adam Thwaites in Scarborough and very reasonably priced.
And then in May 2025 Brooke Shaden stepped into my life, she is a self portrait montage artist selling her work all over the planet. And making how to videos and giving lectures on YouTube in one of these she espouses Take a RISK.
I thought what would be my risk, stop making these for fun Read and offer them for sale;