Wild Girl (August 7, 2002) More fruit from my rewatching of season 2 Angel, this time the 2nd-to-last ep, Through the Looking Glass. I'd completely forgotten that the first time Gunn saw Fred, she was saving his life. I remember being entranced by that scene to begin with, what with the otherworldly fey quality (the whole young girl taming the beast in the forest, dripping blood, etc, just has a very mystic, unicorn/grail sort of feel to it) and in light of subsequent Gunn/Fred developments, it was even more interesting the second time around.

Unfortunately, the action was filmed in such a way as to make good screen shots showing how Fred lured AngelBeast off of his attack on Gunn with a dripping fist full of blood a little tricky, but I did my best with what I had, and hopefully even if you haven't the scene, you can kinda see what happened...

I masked out the central shape by creating a layer on top of everything and filling in the edges with white, leaving the central area transparant so that the screen shots from underneath could show through. Played with the caps and a BBoA stock pic of trees till I liked the arrangements, and added a few extra caps as accents down on the left corner (covered with a color layer of burgandy) which I decided had to be some shape *other* than square since I've been doing so much of that recently. The Fred picture is actually 3 caps; I grafted on a close up of her face and a close up her fist onto a way-stretched out (and thus lacking in detail) full body shot. Oh, and the Gunn cap cut off the top of his head pretty much exactly where I buried it in the edge there, so I was pretty limited about where I could place it. I would have liked to put it a bit lower, but I just couldn't figure out a way to believably reconstruct the rest of his head (hair is so much easier to fudge that way! The curlier the better!) Anyway, after the basic layout was done, I started layering in stock pics for texture in screen mode, including some stars and a peacock tail (twice, once right side up on the left, once upside down on the right). These were in black and white, so I colorized them in pink. Also added a lens flare on a completely black layer, and then set the black layer to screen.

The left top font is square721 and the main font is a squished version of cataneo bt. Didn't use any brushes in this one, surprise, surprise. Gunn speaks the line "What the hell just happened?" and Wes replies "That strange wild girl saved us -- from Angel". I left out the "from Angel" bit since the collage doesn't really deal with the fact that the attacking monster is Angel. Maybe I'll do a different collage one of these days that references that, as Angel's distress at having seen his inner demon was another moving part of the ep...

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Val writes

I don't know Fred very well, or Gunn for that matter.. but I love this collage. The color and text are awesome, but i really really love the angles.. the line at the top, shape and the boxes angeled at the bottom. Came out awesome!!