"Ripped Off" from Jesse Ewers' "Edgar" and "Ode." On my first browse of Jesse's portfolio, I was drawn to his abstract paintings such as "Edgar," but again felt not challenged enough by the thought of merely recreating the colors in a new medium. I was also dawn to "Ode" due to my love of artistic nudes. Since I've been wanting to delve into doing more figure drawing and such, I was excited by the prospect of tackling a rip of "Ode." In the end I decided that, in my medium, a monotone rip of "Ode" would be as un-compelling as an exact paper mosaic replica of somethign as abstract as "Edgar," so I combined the two. This time, instead of juxtaposing elements from each work, I layered them in Photoshop Elements, made "Ode" grayscale and transparent, and turned up the saturation on "Edgar" so that it would more clearly push its way through "Ode." The mosaic is created with 1/2" squares of magazine pages decoupaged onto a canvas panel. Once I'd created the guide image, I used the grid feature in Elements to divide it into all the individual squares so that I could sift through my stash of paper bits to find the ones that most closely approximated what the image was "supposed" to look like in each square.