How 'bout a Little Black & White

Another rainy day. There have been too many of them for my liking this summer. The end of the week was nice and warm, at times hot (for a Northern girl like me), and it was the kind of weather when you don't want to do anything serious, just bask in the shade, have a bite on our little homemade patio, walk in the garden watering the flowers, weeding a bit here and there, feeling the soft flow of warm air on your skin...

To counter that, it has been raining for two days now. It started yesterday, but that was mostly just drizzle. Today it has been pouring down all day, with perhaps a short break at noon, so that I managed to push the doggies out without too much yelling and stamping foot. They don't like the rain, oh noes, but we refuse to have a sandbox for them in the house. Period. As it is, I have to listen closely to what happens outside and kick them out at just the suitable moment when there is either momentarily no rain or only very soft drizzle.

But I've moved on to week 9 of Beyond Layers. The assignment for day 17 was to work in black & white, create a few different images and try and see what works and what doesn't. I have three different images here, and decided I'd stay away from flowers this time. I also thought I'd try out different methods, such as occur to me, to turn the images b&w.

Watering Hen

This is a watering can that stands at our front door, more a decoration than useful gardening equipment. It was originally quite bright but has faded in the few years it has stood there, and I thought b&w would suit it fine. Here I tried out what one must do to make the Desaturate adjustment work.

Processing resources:
- texture Grunged Up by Kim Klassen
- framing action Blur 50 px by Chain

Top Dog

For the above piece, I used the Black & White adjustment layers to remove the colours. The picture was originally rather dark, but shot in natural light in our living room, so it seemed a good idea to make it soft and dreamy (does that make any sort of sense, I wonder?). The dogs in the picture are Marlene and her mother Misaki, who likes to turn the large cushions on our sofa over and settle comfortably on top.

Resources used:
- texture Awaken by Kim Klassen
- texture NF-5 by Jerry Jones
- framing action Motion blur 50 px by Chain

Hideaway

In the third attempt I turned the image b&w using a b&w Gradient Map. The puppy in the picture is one of Misaki's puppies from last October. We had these old mail-sorting boxes in the study at that time, full of mostly my papers, and he would often crawl at the bottom and sleep there. It was a nice, safe hole for him until he literally grew out of it.

Not many resources this time:
- texture Faved by Kim Klassen

Here are recipes again. And tomorrow I'll get to read the post for Day 18 to see what Kim has to say about black & white.