American Gothic

(Original)

Let's start with the classic Americana art piece "American Gothic." This became an Anniversary present for my parents.

(My Parents - Original)

The most time consuming aspect of any rendering is going to be the cropping process. There are many different ways to do this using PhotoShop. In this case I used to Extrating tool.

Basically, you highlight the outline of the image you want to use (in this case my parents). Then you fill the outline and hit extract. Getting the all the detail (like hair) can be tedious. Now we have our isolated image. Here's the pix with the foreground in color and the background in Black & White.

Now we open the American Gothic picture and set it as the background. (Note: Always Duplicate the background and work with the copied image) Then drag the isolated image from Parent's pix onto the Gothic screen. Either it's going to be too big or too small. You are going to have to Transform the scale size. You are going to want to blur the edge slightly of the isolated image to help blend.

After a little play with effects and texturizing you get the final result.