The series of photographs of Hostas, which are included in a separate gallery, have provided inspiration and for many of my montage pictures. In this case the picture below showing the beautiful lines of a hosta leaf started off this picture.

Having found a picture which I really like I often take the image to a different stage by making multiple layers in Photoshop, and, by overlaying them in varying orientations and blend modes produced the design below.

More experimentation resulted in another design which is shown below.

Using the design above, but changing the blend modes of some layers the colours changed dramatically to make a more interesting blue colour.

Cropping the picture above and overlaying the layers again started to make a more positive design. At this point I went to bed and just as I was going off to sleep the idea came to me that it looked rather like the compass points on a map, so I determined to explore this further.

At the next opportunity I searched through my library of books and found an old map with compass points and attractive boat illustrations. I scanned this in and merged it with the design above.

At this point I decided to develop the picture on the theme of a young lady in the Eighteenth Century whose lover has gone off to sea with the navy. She is dreaming of far off places and hoping that he will return. The natural way to proceed was to add a sailing vessel and this slide of a model boat was just right.

The last and most important element was the picture of the young lady. Fortunately Doreen had this old family picture of Aunt Ellen which I had always loved, so after a lot of adjustment to the layer opacities and using many layer masks and adjustment layers the picture was complete.