Thanks for the compliments, Jolly. Gerome's Roman slave markets have an enduring appeal for manip artists, and this one is very much a Jollyrei concept. My contribution began as an experiment in blending Kathy with the existing seated figure - in fact, her left arm is that of the original, painted figure.Barb and Kathy Move to Rome.
Gerome seems to have been one of those painters who paints the same thing - say, a Roman slave market - from several different angles, and at several different times. Here, for example, he has (with a bit of help from Bobinder and me) depicted the selling of @Barbaria1 and her travelling companion @Kathy . How did such nice girls come to such a juncture, eh? I suppose Barb can take comfort that the bidding seems to be lively. And now the girls won't have to worry about where to stay in Rome, and how much it might cost. It's nice to be popular.
Technical Notes:
The original concept (if that's not too lofty a term) for this image was the appearance in my archive of a series of images featuring Caprice, as well as a good sized version of Gerome's painting. The editing of the background was 14 layers to rebuild the crowd and the stage after cutting out the original figures. I floated the idea past Bob, and he got all inspired and did a full cutout and placement of the Kiera Winters (Kathy) image, which was better than my original concept. That sort of set the mood for the final piece. So in the end, this ends up being a joint manip with concept and ideas coming from both Bob and me. All rather fun.
The idea of a collaboration came later, so whilst we each worked at inserting a figure into the painting, our initial backgrounds were different sizes with different colour saturation values. Reconstructing the background, producing Barb's figure, filtering the new composition with consistent colouring, and the treatment of fabrics strewn on the floor are all Jolly's achievements.
but I think it's warranted. After all, Barb's "tight little" is rightly famous and I really did not do it quite enough justice in my original release. The Barb figure was taken from a group photo and the right half of her bottom was covered by someone else's hand. That would obviously not do. Consequently, I had to reconstruct the tight little using other parts of her bottom from other images in the same photoshoot. However, having looked at the image over the weekend (and why not?) the shape was not quite right. So I spent a little time (you can't rush these things) gently caressing the underside of Barb's bottom 
