Flowers and Bugs

Still playing catch up. Day 43 challenge of Beyond Layers was to view two of Kim's recipes and use Kim's texture Peony in a photo. For the first task, I chose a picture that I took of one of the last tulips to blossom this summer in our garden. They were still in bloom on 19 June when I took this photo.  Here I followed Kim's first recipe very closely, the biggest difference was that I used layer masks to keep the background suitably desaturated and not too dark or too light  or contrasty. I even used the same font Kim used for her original photo of her book spine poetry, since I found it was one with European characters and therefore worth downloading to me.

Last of the Tulips

Resources used:
- font KG Somebody That I Used To Know by Kimberly Geswein
- framing action Shadow by Chain

The next photo was taken on a warm day in our garden, when me and Better Half were doing some gardening, and suddenly noticed this pair of very spectacular looking bugs mating on the blossoms of a Meadowsweet bush. They were obviously some kind of long-horned beetles (which in Finnish seems to be, delightfully, sarvijäärä or even more hilariously, hapsenkakkiainen). Anyway, they obligingly stayed there long enough for me to rush for the camera and I even managed to get a few quite tolerable shots of them.  To process, I followed Kim's second recipe, this time with a lot more deviation from hers, though.

Mating on Meadowsweet

Resources:
- texture Framed by Kim Klassen
- framing action Double by Chain

The third challenge was to use Kim's pink texture called Peony. Since it was pink, I thought I'd dig up one of the photos I took in April of all the bouquets me and Better Half received at the end of the term. For this I had a brainwave: instead of going through all adjustments step by step I could try what the adjustments of the previous photo would do to this. So I duplicated the adjustment group of Mating on Meadowsweet, found it looked just fine, I just turned down the opacity another 10% and that was it. This made me a very happy camper indeed. So I just placed the texture there, added the frame and was pleased with the result.

Pink Bouquet

The workflow:
- duplicated adjustment group from Mating on Meadowsweet, turned down group opacity to 70%
- added texture Peony by Kim Klassen at multiply 33%
- flattened image
- added frame: framing action Double by Chain

Linking to Texture Tuesday.