This is another volley match that Joy Foraker (another friend from PhotoshopTechniques.com and a talented designer in her own right) and I completed. This time, Joy suggested that we keep our volleys limited to the theme of "Global Spirituality." Each volley had to retain at least one element of the previous image, and was returned within two days.

Joy began the match with the image to the left - a statue of Buddha, leaving the door wide open for interpretation.

For my return, I used Joy's photo as the background of my image, but recolored and blurred it nearly beyond recognition. The portraits to the left were taken from various sources on the internet, and represent leaders from some of the world's major religions (included are Jesus Christ, Ghandi, Shiva, the Pope, and an unnamed Rabbi.) The big glowing mess to the right is actually an amalgamation of various religious symbols, including the Judeo-Christian Cross and the Star of David, among others.

Joy decided to burn my portraits (I didn't mind), and filled her image with smoke, flames, and text.

For my next return, I wanted to take the match in a little different direction. I masked out all but a small sliver of the previous image, and used quite a bit of typography, set in high contrast again it's background, to fill the canvas. Come to think of it, this image was pretty much all about contrast. White on black. Grungy brushwork over slick vector shapes. Bright colors against fields of desaturated shapes and tones. The faded images laid over top of the images are custom brushes (courtesy of Antibrush.com) taken from scans of the art of Heironymous Bosch (one of my favorite paleo-surrealist Dutch painters.)

Joy's final volley of the match was likewise pretty indistinguishable from the image I gave her. This one's full of of lots of colorful shapes and typography, which gave me plenty to work with for my final volley.

I wanted to come full circle with the final image, and still push the envelope of the thematic elements we'd laid out in the beginning. My subject was a photo by Stephane Bourson that I found at photo.net. The tatoo work (religious symbols, all) was all mine, and was accomplished using custom shapes and the Liquify tool to fit them to the contours of the girl's body. The halo around her head is actually a scan of a coffee-stain on a piece of paper, set to Overlay against the background. I used the angel from Joy's piece as well, an almost-abstract shape against the otherwise-almost-photorealistic elements of the picture.