If Your Pet Had Thumbs

The challenge is "... if your pet had thumbs, what would it do?" - by David R. Beebe

The challenge is "... if your pet had thumbs, what would it do?" My first thought is they would drive the car so I started looking through my Aperture libraries for appropriate images to work with in Photoshop Elements. Because this was a casual challenge for the March meeting of the North Tampa Art League, I didn't want to do a dedicated photo shoot.
Originally I was going to place both of our German Shepherds in Pat's Tbird but I came across this photo from 2007 of Pat and her sister Joyce in the Smokey Mountains. That gave me a car for each dog. I isolated the cars and added the image as a layer into my project.
From the same roadtrip, I found a photo of Joyce and her Mustang that I could use for the background layer. I cloned out Joyce's car. Pat was removed from the T-bird and her sister Joyce was removed from the Mustang by cloning trees from this layer over top of them in their layer.
I knew which pet portraits I wanted to use to put them in the driver's seat but I had to flip Django's image horizontally first and isolate them from their backgrounds.
I added different degrees of motion blur to all 4 photos as they were all static images. I also added a radial blue to the T-bird's tires. I used the burn tool to darken the asphalt. Before that, I had added a shadow under the T-bird but that was not enough and it still look distracting.