As a hobby artist, but someone who is both a working author and a former professional photographer (in the days of film, so I didn't have huge Photoshop skills until I started messing around making collages) I'm really aware of the importance of people's images and copyright. One of the reasons (beyond it being easier to blend) for giving people weird heads was to protect the anonymity of models (I mostly use photos of people from the late 19th or early twentieth century who are probably long dead, but nonetheless). 

(The only image here that doesn't fit is the image that became my fox headed woman -- I got it from Pxfuel and haven't been able to track down any attribution data for it)

The other thing is that because I use the same images a lot, I have built up a bit of a mythology in my head over who these people are. I think of my images as pictures of a parallel England that have fallen through time and space: a dusty shoebox in the attic of a haunted house, containing battered photographs of another world.

This is the first image I ever did using this character. You can see my blending skills had a long way to go. It was also the first picture where I posted it talking about the Silent Ones: strange, mute, fairy-like creatures who live in the corners of the mundane that human beings don't like to think about.

I think this was the only time I used these characters again -- I was getting better at blending, but you can see there are elements that still don't work. I like the way the 3D extrusion of the magical circle has come out. It was part of a joke for a group where I post art, on the absurdity of Western ritual magic invocations if you translated them to apply to normal people ("I invoke you, Colin, Deputy Head of PR for Invertech Swindon, by your great and terrible superior, Heather, and her superior, the all powerful Martin, CEO of the South East and Central Region...") 

This one also came out a bit dark, but that turned out to be a monitor issue.

I don't do a lot of colour, and this image is a partial example of why -- I find it very difficult to get the number of grunge layers in that I need for blending, and it's just another set of variables to blend. I still think it's come out alright -- the image is a woman in carnival clothing by Violetta on Pixabay, with an attribution free image of an abandoned cemetery and my faithful deer skull. 

I loved the idea of The Silent Ones trying to sing to cheer people up, except that they can't make any noise that human beings can hear. And their songs cause terrible, portentous nightmares...

This one is one of the first where I started to be happy with my blending -- I had a goat eye from Wikimedia that I wanted to use, and I stumbled on this picture of the round pond just at the base of the Round Tower in Windsor Castle (I can't find the original, but it was copyright free to my knowledge).The blur on the bushes at the front made me love the idea of presenting it as a 'candid', almost like something photographed by a spy or a nature photographer: The Silent Ones spending time with their God, who seems to be huge and lives under a well manicured Victorian garden...

Looking back at this one, I don't think it's perfect, but I do think I got the light right. It's called 'We're all in this together', and has a spider-centaur thing with a head but no face flambouyantly denying something to a very contrite looking Silent One. I'm quite happy with the way that I blended the body of the mannequin (it came from an image by the photographer Vargasz on Pixabay) with the stock spider I got from a museum on Wikimedia. I think I managed a decent lighting effect and three dimensionality on the stacks of money. 

The second time I've used this sculpture of the Buddhist hell of hands, this time more successfully, I think. The background is one of my own photos -- of the New River in Hackney, London. Again, we see the Silent Ones, plus a lady observing lockdown by using adequate face protection, and maintaining social distance. 

And here we have my latest in this thread. The background is an image from the Queen's Wood in London's Highgate, taken personally. You see a lot of my usual assets, plus a model from a photograph taken by Iranian photographer Mohammad Metri (model unidentified) that I got from Pixabay. Here, the Silent Ones stand in the background. In my imagination, they're benevolent, if moderately clueless about the human world. I think the model's expression certainly conveys that she's not taking any rubbish from them.