This is another of my aerial view collages – click the image to see it bigger.
Birds fly over a forest at twilight, taking messages to a loved one. Between the trees are little houses and lakes; on some of the lakes are boats.
This one is almost entirely composed of stamps; the sea and the birds are tracing paper, put through my printer* and superimposed with wavy lines from postcodes. The beach is made from manilla envelopes.
Notice that each bird is now carrying a tiny little letter, too.
It accompanies others in the series: Green Shield stamps paddyfields and Stamp Valley (which I am eventually going to redraw now that my style has developed a bit on this project).
* Yay for the uncomplaining HP 5524 – you might change your IP address far more frequently than anyone would think necessary, but you aren’t afraid of a bit of non-approved paper stock going through your innards.
On the other hand, if Santa is listening and has any extra space in his sleigh, I think an A3 scanner is currently top of my wishlist. Sorry HP 5524, I still love you, I just hate aligning multiple scans of a single picture.
Myfanwy Tristram 
Photoshop has a feature called Photomerge. It is your new best friend. It will stitch all your scans together into one single picture and all you have to do is make sure they are all the right way up before you start.
Go to ‘file’, scroll down to ‘automate’, then select ‘photo merge’. You will get a new window with a few options – check ‘auto’, then for ‘source files’ either browse to select all the scans you want to merge into one big picture or if they’re already open in PS then click on ‘add open files’. Then click ok and watch the magic happen :)
OK, I don’t think I have it, but I did find the very thrilling ‘Picture Package’ which I can see coming in useful in all sorts of other ways… Will go on exploring; there’s loads of stuff in these menus that I never even look at. Thanks for the prod :)
Oooooooh! I’m going to go and check that out. My version of Photoshop is very, very old, so it doesn’t always have exciting features, but I will look. Excitement!
I hate doing that job too, and guess what I’ve been doing most of today? Blaahh! But alas, my copy of CS4 doesn’t have Photomerge in the menu either. It has ‘automate’ but in that it lists only the mysterious ‘batch’ and ‘create droplet’. Love your stamp collage Myf. Looking beautiful!
Thank you :)
Yes, my copy of Photoshop is absolutely ancient. I look into replacing it every now and again, but although I brace myself, the price is always way more than I have been expecting!
You should definitely have photomerge in CS4. Read this:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/666458
I’m sorry I got your hopes up with Photoshop, I lose track of what’s in each version. I’m using CS6, I bought it at a hugely reduced price when I was doing my MA last year. If you are a student now you can also buy the student version – it was around 300 pounds instead of 2K for the whole CS6 package. You can also buy it separately. Adobe are pushing their creative cloud subscription software but CS6 is still available.
Older versions of PS have the photo merge feature too, it came in with CS3. You probably know a design firm who could sell you their old CS3, 4 or 5 installation dvd, or there’s eBay?
Meanwhile, there is a free, open source, photo stitcher called Hugin that you can get from
http://hugin.sourceforge.net
lots of people praise it and it’s free so why not try that?
Really really useful, thank you! :D