"Oh bother"

Assignment for class. Three source photos. Color scheme (analogous in this case).

Source photos:
Winnie the Pooh from VioletBreezeStock
http://violetbreezestock.deviantart.com/art/Christopher-Robin-and-Pooh-328032606

Little boy (Christopher Robin) from Stephasaurus-Stock
http://stephasaurus-stock.deviantart.com/art/zane-02-62206624

Background trees ???
Found it! It's on Room With a View's Facebook page September 23, 2012.
https://www.facebook.com/WithaView?ref=ts
A Room With A View~The Crimson Forest in Gryfino, Poland

Tips

In The Fox Girl, the original image of the masked girl in the field was not as separate from the background as I wanted. I selected her and did a levels adjustment on her then continued with the duotone composite.

Sometimes it helps to select a bit of the scenery and composite it over the element I'm inserting in order to make it look more like everything belongs there. I did this with the weeds/brush. I did the same thing in Radio Flyer.

Tips

In my duotone of the woman on the stairs, I found that it helped the illusion if there was a shadow on  the wall from her hand. On a separate layer I made a rough outline of her hand, placed that layer under her layer, filled it with black, making a box blur then lowered the opacity.

In the original photo, she was facing the other direction. I flipped her horizontally so that the lighting in the composite would be consistent.

I used a 2 pixel eraser at 28% to soften the wisps of her hair.

Duotones

A duotone will create varying shades of gray ending up with a rich tonal reproduction of a black and white photograph that you can not get with just black and white inks. A duotone is more saturated, textured, compelling than a black and white photo. It can convey mood and even time. Many old photographs were printed with ink extracted from cuttlefish which gives the image an archival appearance. 

The following examples of duotones were made with photos from the internet and DeviantArt (Thank you Dracoart, Plague Plague, merimask, froweminahildstock, Grinmer_Stock)  I have composited elements from other photos into them.  

Elements composited in are:
 In Radio Flyer, both the Radio Flyer wagon and the old truck. 
 In The Fox Girl, the fox. Not the girl.
 In Duotone #1, the woman.

I put Teddy into the Chernobyl photo because it seemed fitting and it was fun. ;)

Radio Flyer

The Fox Girl

Duotone #1

Teddy Goes To Chernobyl