The Making of Sponge Bush and Bill...

To create my composite image I started with a jpeg of  President and Mrs. Bush dancing at the recent inaugural ball.
	Next I decided to replace the presidents face with that of my sons favorite cartoon character and all around good guy, SpongeBob SquarePants. To do this I started with a jpeg of SpongeBob.
	Using my handy dandy scissoring tool I outlined the "non-sponge" elements of SpongeBob's face creating a mask.
So to get my intermediate file - SpongeBush.jpg - I composited SpongeBob's face on the dancing and smiling president Bush. I did this based on the instructions given on the project web. In addition to the scaling and positioning described there, I also rotated the face horizontally about the Y axis so that SpongeBush would be facing his bride and scaled up the original image of the dancing bushs.
Feeling as though I had sufficiently defiled the leader of the free worlds likeness I turned my attentions to the smerking band leader hiding behind the smiling couple. He immediately brought to mind the comic strip character Bill the Cat from Bloom County, as one of his inate abilities is to include himself where he doesn't belong.
	As before I used my handy dandy scissoring tool and created a mask for his Billness. If you look at this mask it's really detailed with all the random hairs that protrude from the cat, yet it took just a couple minutes to create with the scissoring tool. This exercise did point out the shortest path issue with my default implementation. as the tool would not by itself trace out the hairs instead it would cut them off at the base. The solution to this problem was simple and quick I need only "fix" the coutour at each adjacent peak and valley.
	Once I had the mask I simply composited Bill into the original picture. I decided that Bill would not by nature pop up in the background but instead would insert himself front and center, so that's where he ended up.