Go Fly A Kite

This is for the Kite challenge at Three Muses.

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Ball of Confusion

This is for the Written Word challenge at Three Muses.

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I went from thoughts of newspaper clippings to news in general, and pondered how we get over-saturated by bad news these days. I don't have newspapers lying around the house, so I started collecting terrible news headlines online and kept dropping them into layers (after a bit of formatting). Then I spherized them (spell-check doesn't like that word) and laid them over a globe. Then I did some swirly things behind it.

All the while, I had the old Temptations song "Ball of Confusion" running through my head. (You youngsters should look it up in YouTube--great song.) We were pretty pessimistic about the state of the world in those days. People still carry on as if the world is about to end. Did I mention we banned the news channels in our household about a year ago?

Botanical

This is for the Botanical challenge at Take a Word.

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The word botanical makes me think of those detailed drawings of leaves and plants. I was going for a somewhat whimsical look here. I wanted a leaf that still looked like a leaf, but also so you could see what I see when I look closely at a leaf--a little tree.

I picked a leaf and scanned the back of it where all the veins can be seen. Then I did magical things to it using probably five layers where I carefully separated the veins to color them brown and did some fancy footwork with noise and pixel effects to give them texture and a hint of leaves, and added a shadow to give them depth. I gave each tree a cast shadow, that was set at around 45% transparency. There are probably more than twenty layers in my working copy.

I used a photo I took this morning of a large lawn and played around with it to make it look a little more like a painting.

April Come She Will

This is for the April challenge at Inspiration Avenue.

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Yellow Moon on the Rise

This is for the Moon challenge at Take a Word.

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The globes and stones were digitally created and finished up in Photoshop. The moon is from my brush.

Making a Moon Brush

I think Photoshop is one of those programs that even if you have used it for years, there is always something new to learn. I started using Photoshop at the start of the millennium, but it was only last year that I discovered the magic of brushes. My version of Photoshop is the very ancient CS2 for Mac, but I'm sure most everyone can follow along with me.

Brushes are very handy for anything monotone that you use a lot, or for something that repeats on your work. I've created brushes for the moon, trees, stars, shells, pearls, and one I use to trim my clouds. (Yes, you can use brushes with the eraser too.)

So, here's how I did the moon:

First of all, I found a picture of the moon at the NASA site and I trimmed away the black  space and left the background transparent. Then I reversed the image. Since the moon is white against a dark background, this is a necessary step, unless you want your brush to come out as a negative moon. I also lightened it, because the outer space pictures have more contrast than what we see here on earth.

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The next step was to choose define brush preset which is located in the edit menu.

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It will ask you to name the brush, and then the brush is created. It appear with your preset brushes. Now you can stamp away with your new brush. You can make it bigger, smaller, colored, or change the transparency. To toggle the size quickly, use the [ and the ] keys.

There are numerous tutorials on the web that also teach about brushes. Just google away and you will find them.

Seeds of Wisdom

This one is for the Seeds challenge at Inspiration Avenue.

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For this one I created the seeds and the sprouts in Illustrator first. I thought about sprouting some real seeds, but I didn't want to wait that long. The moon is a brush that I created. The cloud is from a photo. The statue is from a very old photo of a statue in an art museum. The yellow flowers were growing in my garden.

Painterly

This is for the Out of Bounds challenge at Three Muses.

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The frames were created in Photoshop. The painting on the right is an old photo that I applied artistic filters too. The wallpaper was created in Adobe Illustrator. I also created the palette in Illustrator and finished it up in Photoshop.

It Looks Like Rain

This is for the Umbrella challenge at Take a Word.

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I took my black umbrella outside to photograph it, but between the crazy wind and the fact that it was partially broken anyhow, I realized I had to make one from scratch. I did so in my trusty old Macromedia Freehand. I should be using Illustrator, but I'm faster in Freehand. The clouds, and scenery are from my photos. The moon is a brush I created, and the rain drops are recycled from a photo I took of a clear marble. Yes, that's my dainty little hand.

Butterflies Are Free

This is for the Butterflies challenge at Sunday Postcard Art.

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Making Mountains

Last summer I created a piece called Paper Mountains Majesty. I thought the making of this one might be fun to share.

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I love mountains, but I live in Florida. I have a few pictures of mountains from my travels, but I only have so many and often I can't find just the right one. So, with that in mind, I began to play and to explore ways to make mountains in Photoshop. The idea hit me that if I crumpled pieces of tissue paper, I could make craggy mountains and color them any way I wanted. I realized that it didn't even matter what color the paper was, because in Photoshop, we have full control of colors and how bright or dull or dark we make them.

I took several pictures of the tissue paper mountains. Below are but a few. It was windy that day. If you look carefully, you can see where I had to set down objects to keep it from blowing away.

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The other items I included were a flat sheet of crumpled paper for the foreground, a photo of some clouds, and some nice juicy strawberries. Note that I set the strawberries on white paper towels so I could trim them easily later.

The trees on the mountains were all created from a brush that I made from a photo of a pine tree. I dotted them throughout the mountains and varied the sizes. One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts for the brush (and also the eraser) is the use of the two bracket keys to toggle it bigger and smaller.

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I added little shadows by all the trees to give them depth.

I wound up with numerous layers for this--more than I am showing below. The snowcaps of the mountains are copies that I bleached out and then trimmed.

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It all sounds like a lot of work, but when you are on a creative roll, you hardly notice.

Up, Up and Away

This is for the Balloons challenge at Three Muses. I'm a little early, but I thought it would take longer to create this piece.

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It all flowed from the squirrel and the balloon. I really wanted a mouse, but I didn't have a picture of a mouse, or a mouse to pose for me. I have a picture of a rat (we had a rat problem in the neighborhood for a while), but a rat would have taken everything in a different direction.

I created the balloons in Adobe Illustrator. The wallpaper, clock, and mirror were also created in Illustrator. The curtains were created in Photoshop using gradients. The rest was patched together from photos, including the squirrel, who was kind enough to pose on the bird feeder. The tabby is my cat Nigel.