More Photoshop: Billboards and "Big"

I continued to envision my world by way of Photoshop this past week.

Up first are a pair of billboards that would advertise the Barefoot Family Farm to potential tourists along Interstate 40.  Near the farm in the Meadow township in North Carolina (Johnston County) is exit 334, which eventually leads to the farm by way of these directions.  The entire family is pictured as well as an alternate slogan to the official one "The way it was before and the way it will be again."  (Try as I might, the longer slogan just wouldn't fit.)  Alongside it is the farm's logo and below that is the exit number.

I used a billboard given to me by my former teacher Brady Poirier; he used it in some projects in class.  I mentioned where the main picture came from, the logo is also from my personal file, and I added my own text.  The two pictures of the interstate (called the James Harrington Freeway in that part of the state) come from the new version of Google Maps, which gave me easy access to the ground-level views I needed.  The top photograph looks north from Godwin Lake Road, and the bottom looks south from Woods Crossroads Road.

Below that, meet Big, the star of the Ultimate Wrestling Federation.  I gave Big's story an entire chapter in The Buddy Wayne Chronicles back in 2007, but I have neglected to picture how he would look like in all those years.  The montage came together this way:

The face is that of Australian rules football star Barry Hall, and I added a bit of hair above his bald head by way of a paint job on a new layer.  The body below him depicts Leaping Lanny Poffo, the former WWE competitor who was the basis for my character. (I had a soft spot for Poffo, as despite having one of the WWE's best gimmicks of the 1980s with Frisbee throwing and poetry, he was marketed as a jobber, or someone told to lose every match.  Worse, he is the brother of one of its biggest stars, the late "Macho Man" Randy Savage - successor to the legendary Hulk Hogan as heavyweight champion - but WWE wouldn't acknowledge it until years later.  Poffo later agreed to turn from a good guy to a bad one under the nickname "Genius" and finally got pushed, much to my dismay.) 

I liked Poffo's promotional picture, but didn't like the chain-link jacket, so I substituted another one I found at a memorabilia resale site for the top.  In turn, I recolored the jacket blue to match both part of the shorts and an image from a YouTube video I have saved from a pre-match on WWE syndicated program.  I would have used a still from the original, but the video was of poor quality. 

My original idea was to place Big (real name: Lanny Ray Mobley) amid the backdrop of a wrestling ring, but with the picture cut off at the legs, that would not have been suitable, so the all-purpose brick wall will have to do yet again.