Changes and Digitilisation

I originally wanted to use a skull to symbolise death, however I feel it holds little relevance to the image. Thus I am going to replace it with a hand, in order to represent the death of the physicality of the newspaper and also symbolise the hand which turns the pages. At the moment I am envisioning a large hand, serving as the focal point of the image and stretching towards the pixels,  as a secondary point of emphasis and working as a lead line. I still want to draw on Van Gogh's influence to create a yellow hand, to represent age, further symbolised by bones in reference to a skeleton. I also would like to add details of newsprint to emphasise what the hand represents; the death of print news.
In order to create the hand, I drew on Nechvatal's digital art and decided to use photoshop to digitally manipulate a hand. The first thing I did was take a photo of my hand stretching out towards the camera. I used a low aperture, to create a shallow depth of field, in order to give the perception that the hand is reaching out. I want to place it on the background so that the hand appears to be pointing to the 'pixels' in the corner of my art work. This will symbolise stretching out to the future as the newspaper becomes more digitalised.

I then deleted the unnecessary background and layered a photograph of crushed paper and my original newspaper collage over the top. This gave the skin a wrinkled appearance as well as subtly hinting at the newspaper subject matter of the artwork.

I then had to add the bones to the hand in order to skeletonise it. I used the same technique of layering images over the top, using a scan of an x-ray. However unlike the skull, it was unable to be simply layered on top as the hand was in the wrong position. Therefore I cropped each individual bone and used the rotate tool to change the perspective. Eventually I ended up with this image of the hand. 

I then set the bone layer to overlay so it would blend into the hand. 

 Finally, I adjusted the levels and colour balance to make the hand more yellow, in reference to Van Gogh's painting 'Skull with a Burning Cigarette'.

Now I just need to combine my final layers. Another day!