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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Inspiration from a friend



I like football. I know that not a lot of women do, but I am a big NFL fan. Starting in September, I know that every Sunday night there will be a football game on television, but we have reached the beginning of the playoffs and while there were two games on today, there wasn't one tonight. What to do with myself? I took the opportunity to catch up on my blog reading, then turned to good ol' photoshop. I had the time but more importantly, I had the inspiration to play, thanks to Nancy.

You see, she did a blog post today about playing with backgrounds. This rang a bell deep in my brain and I remembered an afternoon of fun spent in Nancy's basement, ages ago, tearing up paper and playing with tape and paint, making backgrounds on canvas boards. I scanned all of those, so I could use them digitally. Then I plum forgot about them. Until today, when I read how Nancy found some of her old backgrounds that she too had forgotten about.

So tonight, with no football on television to amuse me, I played around in photoshop and ended up with what you see above. While I won't bore you with every little step I did -- and frankly, I couldn't possibly remember every little step anyway -- I will explain a bit of its creation.

The bottom layer is a photograph I took in Ottawa of some roses, which I squared off and then altered a bit, using curves, colour levels, saturation and brightness. I think that was it. I also applied two filters: a canvas texture and poster edges. The next two layers are two different textures I created myself, including the digital scan of a tape-and-torn-text background I created that afternoon at Nancy's long ago. Next is a texture I found at ShadowHouse Creations, followed by a layer where I placed my watermark, then finally, the top layer, where I used an edge I bought at CottageArts. Each layer also has its own blending mode, but I won't test your patience by listing those too!

So, thanks Nancy, for the memory jog. The timing was perfect!

5 comments:

Lost Aussie said...

As I said on Nancy's blog - glad that moments of frustration are good for something! :-))

nancy said...

we just might have to do another background day!!!i can't believe its been two years!!!great work!
and thanks for the texture link

Charmingdesigns said...

Wonderful!!

Kelly Warren said...

beautiful!

angelandspot said...

Beautiful!

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