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!