the dingbat character above was turned into a mask and saved to disc. she was then loaded into each of the beach images to create masks. then i played with combining the two images with a mask added as a second layer.

angel on photo saved as jpg. two angels on solid saved as gif.

while looking around, i found this little fellow in webdings...i forget which letter. made him into a mask and then went looking for an image to suit him. ran across a clock face that i had used in a collage in the extras/silly stuff section of this set of class pages so i merged him into that and darkened him by lowering the contrast.  then he was moved into a new layer over one of the sliced pieces of the collage image. looks like the tax man trying to spoil my dreams of being a beach bum....no way guy, can't spoil my fun!   lol!

and here are a couple of masks made from plain old arial black font. one for me (with food :) and one for *himself* the cat. i don't know that masks are the best way to do this, but if there was a word, name or phrase you wanted to be able to plug into different images, having it saved as a mask might be one option.