Richard Manning

Pink Floyd Book Tree Of Half Life 1997

I received a scan of the tree photographed on Hampstead Heath, and a trace of the silhouette of the head. I scanned the trace and made a layer of the outline and reduced the opacity to approximately thirty percent, this I positioned over the tree. I was now able to see where the branches needed to be added and removed. The trunk I made a layer of and altered its width in the Scale mode, positioned it, feathered the joined edge and blended together. The work was carried out on a small computer and not a lot of memory or Ram. I worked mainly at two or three hundred percent up in size. By a lengthy process of making layers of sections of the background sky and then altering them over the width, I was able to block out the excess twigs and branches to achieve the basic head shape as dictated by the trace layer. Having done that, I then made a feathered layer of the obscured branches and twigs and moved them to be inside the area of the trace and on top of the stretched layer of the sky. This was done all the way round the head trace shape. Twigs from a lower part of the tree were unable to be used in a higher part of the tree because of the subtle overall gradation of the background sky, and likewise twigs from higher sections were not usable in the lower parts. It came down to using single twigs and branches and altering sizes or flipping them horizontally and making sure visually they couldn't be seen as the same branch or twig.

Hipgnosis Album Art