Vases, Bikes, Summer Nights and Dogs

On day 64 of Beyond Layers, the challenge was to use a certain texture Kim posted and experiment with some masking tricks she shared. She gave a recipe, which I, for once, followed pretty closely without too much tweaking.  I did, however, add another texture. The photo was taken in April at the student exhibition at the community college where I work.

Pictures at an Exhibition - Vase with Birds

Resources:
- texture Jay by Kim Klassen
- texture Tin Type 1900 by Distressed Textures

The second picture dates from our annual camp with the Finnish Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club. Every summer we get together with other Dandie owners and have a fun weekend. The shot was taken on a cloudy and rather windy night by the lake, and I had a lot of fun post processing it rather heavily.

A Summer Night

Thank you for the textures:
- Distressed Textures by Denise Love @ 2 Lil’ Owls Studio
- Paper Pack 3 by dierat

In the third picture I once again returned to Zwolle, where, among loads of bikes, I found this very attractive feminine specimen, and processed with a texture of my own.

The Ladybike

Lastly there's a scrapbooking layout I made of our youngest Dandie Justiina. Originally she was just lying down on the grass, but the very moment I pressed the camera button she jumped up and rushed towards me to find out what it was I was doing. I have been viewing several layouts lately done in the artsy style, and here's my shot at it. I really enjoyed the creation process of this one.

Resources:
- background paper from paper pack I Can See Clearly Now by myself
- masks from Shadowhouse Creations Splatter Mask Set 2 by Jerry Jones
- brush from Moments 2 by Fran
- flowers from kit Bleu comme une orange by Fran
- stitches from Coutures/Stitches 1 by Fran
- text brushes by Aurorabor
- watercolour brushes by Ron Deviney
- splatter brushes by Robyn Cough
- font Jazz LET
- font Zapfino

Finding Shapes - Converging Lines

At last I've reached the last installment of the Finding Shapes challenge. What I have this time are converging lines. The first one is just another brick wall, but I really liked the unexpected contrast of two colours of tiles and then the fence on top. Here I applied two texture layers to change the mood of the picture into something a bit more dramatic.

Another Brick, Another Wall

Resources:
- textures from Delicate Paints Textures and Vintique Fine Art Textures by Denise Love @ 2 Lil’ Owls Studio

Next I have here yet another shot from Salzburg, under the same bridge by the River Salzach that I have posted a layout of earlier. I did some adjustments in Lightroom and then textured the picture lightly.

Under the Bridge

Resources:
- texture from The Grey Collection by Denise Love @ 2 Lil’ Owls Studio

In the third picture I'm again by a river, this time the Trave in Lübeck. I shot the picture in May 2012, but the title and the treatment of the photo arise from the fact that I remembered clearly standing at the same spot in the 1980s, when me and Better Half were visiting the city together. Here I was trying to achieve an old, soft and faded look, and processed and textured accordingly.

Remembering

Resources:
- textures from The Stained Collection and The Creative Black Mask 2 Collection by Denise Love @ 2 Lil’ Owls Studio

The last picture this time is sort of me drawing a conclusion of the shapes  challenge - in addition to converging lines, there are squares, rectangles and circles in the photo. This one was shot in Vienna, at the railway station in Schönbrunn. We had arrived from Salzburg that day and were taking a flight back home the next day, but there was time enough to go and visit the Schönbrunn Castle. The station itself was a very nice mix of old and new. Here I applied gently two textures by Sirius-sdz.

Auf dem Bahnhof

Resources:
- textures from Texture Pack 3 and Texture Pack 9 by Sirius-sdz

Finding Shapes - Circles & Triangles

I'm still looking for shapes. In the first two, it's very obviously circles. The first one comes from the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and like the blue windows I've posted before, the photo is not from an exhibition but the building itself. If I remember correctly, this was the ceiling of the lift. Isn't it like dozens of tiny moons gathered together? All I did to the image was some cross-processing in Lightroom.

Lunatic

Again, my second picture was taken on the same trip, still travelling towards Britain. We were boarding the ship in Ijmuiden, and from the gangway one could look out from these circular windows. When I looked out, I saw even more circles - the windows of the terminal building. This was another picture which I only slightly processed in Lightroom, that's all.

Boarding in Ijmuiden

The third photo is yet another travelling shot, and just happens to be from the Netherlands like the previous one. This was taken at the Schiphol airport when we were on our way to Birmingham to Crufts Dog Show last year, and it has received only minor adjustments in Lightroom.

Local Presence

The next picture takes us back to Finland, although not quite home this time either. I took it on our barbershop singing course in Orivesi a year ago, from the veranda of the lovely Singing Cottage there was - the charming old building was all for the twenty or so of us for the four days we spent there. The hill it stood on diminishes in the picture, but still you can see the twisted shapes of the pines on the slope of the hill and just about discern the fields and woods. What a wonderful place it was, I seriously hope to be able to visit it again and sing the harmonies with old and new friends.

Summer View

Resources:
- texture Word by Kim Klassen

Sharing this one at Kim's Texture Tuesday.

Finding Shapes 2 - Rectangles

Didn't I know this from my writing days - I really can go on tweaking anything I create forever, if I don't simply post it somewhere and call it finished. I used to write and rewrite and rewrite a little poem again and again, literally for years, and now I notice I'm doing the same to my pictures. So it's high time to post these pictures off and be done with them and tackle something new.

I took the first picture in May 2012 while travelling towards Scotland with my students. We stayed overnight in Zwolle, and I found this pretty door on our evening walk in town.

Red Door

I layered the picture with texture Waterfront 17 by Kim Klassen altogether four times with various blending modes, masking off various sections of the texture on each layer.

The second picture dates from the same trip. This time we were heading back home and walked about in Lübeck, waiting to take our boat home across the Baltic Sea. It's just another office building somewhere in the city centre, but I found it attractive, especially how the top floor windows reflected the blue sky and the ones downstairs remained black, but also other contrasts, such as the elaborate 19th century door frame and the modern door with company logos.

Looking at the sky

I started processing this photo as another textured image, but was never quite satisfied with it. Then I revisited some digital scrapbooking sites and ran across these techniques of making a photo look part like a drawing, part like a painting. Tried it, and still wasn't quite happy with it, so I went on to try out another new technique, using frames but painting partly outside the frame. These techniques are certainly something I'm going to play with later on, too.
 Resources:
- Brushes & frame
- Brush stamp 
- Papers 
- Font 1
- Font 2 

The third picture is from Salzburg, on a trip we took to the World Dog Show immediately after my trip to Scotland. We walked along the Salzach under a bridge, and high up there was this cage, for maintenance, I suppose.

Kein Eintritt

This one was created much like the one above: I started by texturing the photo, then decided needed a frame, then decided I'd make it into a scrapbooking layout. *sigh* Now I'm letting go of it. No more tweaking.

 Resources:
- texture Cool Grunge by Kim Klassen 
- mask by Julie Mead Designs
- background paper from paper pack Green Finch and Linnet Bird by myself
 - font Dusty Rose NF
- font Mary Helen JF

Finding Shapes 1 - Squares

Beyond Layers day 63 challenge was to find and photograph geometric shapes. The first shape was a square. Here I'm posting two square pictures.  The first one was taken in February when we were rehearsing for our Easter week performance of Stabat Mater. These are windows in the Suomussalmi church. There was beautiful light, but I needed to lighten and smooth the image up, so I applied a bokeh texture.

Winter Light

Resources:
- texture from October 2012 Bokeh Set by Jerry Jones @ Shadowhouse Creations

The second photo was taken at the Gallery of Modern art in Glasgow. All in all, I found the building itself far more interesting than the exhibitions at the time I visited the gallery. To match the flowing shapes in the windows, I applied a texture to give the same kind of effect to the rest of the photo.

Blue Window

Resources:
- texture from Creative Black Mask 2 Collection by Denise Love @ 2 Lil’ Owls Studio

Pieces of Me, Days 4 & 5

I'm posting some pictures to the originally one-week Beyond Layers challenge Pieces of me. This'll be the last installment in the series. On the fourth day the topic I chose was A Light Fixture.

The light in the first picture is one of many at my work place, they are all over the building, along corridors and in the concert halls. I think they are lovely in their clarity and simplicity, they create a beautiful play of light and shade against the white walls. The picture was taken on a  typically dark Friday afternoon last December when I was walking the corridors and thinking how I longed for more light, and how the days would still continue to grow shorter.

Resources:

- font Denigan by Måns Grebäck

The challenge for the second photo was a favourite beverage. Well, I have many, tea being the everyday favourite. This one is a sort of festive variety, Chai Latte - I first tasted it a couple of years ago in Britain and have since discovered it is to be had in Finland as well, but unfortunately not in my home town, so I can only have it when travelling. This particular drink was enjoyed at Birmingham Airport on our way back home from the Crufts Dog Show in March 2013. It still makes my mouth water.

Resources:

- font Chopin Script by ClaudeP

- brush by Coreaux 

- texture Soft and Sweet by Kim Klassen

The third photo was brought aboout by the prompt Through your window. The squirrel seated on the roof of our woodshed is one of at least eight that have frequented our bird feeding post this winter. They still hang around, since we still feed the birds, because the nights are so cold, below zero almost every night. Now they have started to change colour, most of them are wearing their summer clothes and have turned red or at least reddish.

Frequent Visitor

Resources:- texture Revolution by Kim Klassen

Sharing at Texture Tuesday

Pieces of Me, Day 3

Another picture post to the originally one-week Beyond Layers challenge Pieces of me. On the third day the topics were Kitchen faucet and Your front door.

The first image needs little explanation. It's the kitchen faucet installed in our kitchen at the time our house was built 11 years ago, very typical in Finland. I still love the tiles we chose for the wall.

Photo taken on 23 February, 2014.

Resources:
- ribbon by Mediamilitia
- texture Waterfront 19 by Kim Klassen
- font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein

The second photo dates from last autumn. Without the chrysanthemums, it could have been taken last weekend, or any weekend when we have no longer or not yet snow. Just like yesterday, on a day off we like to work in the garden doing this and that, and the dogs keep watch. They sit or lie at the door, on the lawn, under the trees, occasionally even in the flower beds and let us know immediately if any suspicious-looking strangers try to pass by our yard in cars, on motorbikes or bikes or, horror of horrors, on foot.

Photo taken on 12 October, 2013

Looking at the picture more closely, now I actually notice another thing that tells this is an old photo. The girls (Justiina at the bottom left, Marleena at the top right) nowadays look much more adult. 

Resources: 

 - texture Empty Page by Kim Klassen 
- paper Wineberries Dogwood and Tea 03 by myself (coming soon)
- font Sweetly Broken by Brittney Murphy Design
- PhotoMask 53 by Julie Mead

Withered

So now we have snow. Although it's now lighter and not pitch-black in the evening, I'm not feeling overly delighted about. I guess I might be happy about it if I didn't know that it'll be there now for the next six months. Yes, it might melt away for a while, but it'll be back, and the melting away is almost worse - although I don't love it, I don't dislike snow as such, but I do dislike slushy roads, slippery roads, icy roads and streets.  Also this means we'll be ploughing and shovelling snow for months and months. Better Half already did the first take yesterday afternoon, and today it was my turn to start. Again, it's not too bad, I actually like it, when it's not too heavy and wet and there's not too much of it, but it's the fact that you have to clear the snow, whether or not you have the time or inclination, if you are to move at all…

I'm off work for almost a week now. Might perhaps get a challenge or two done? Today I cleared one: day 60 at BL. Before I got so far, however, I did some serious pruning in my photo archives from this and last year, and got rid of about a thousand photos, and am feeling awfully accomplished. I got myself Lightroom last month, and don't regret it - it made doing away with the photos so much easier, although I'm only just beginning to learn to use the program.

Anyway, day 60 challenge at Beyond Layers was to use some scripted textures and follow another recipe by Kim. I was not overly enthusiastic about using the scripts on top of the images as such, but I thought I could do something with them if I found the right image. (Read: a photo with enough white space, not green, like most of my non-winter pictures…) So I dug up a picture of leaves that I took about a month ago when rummaging in our old house. The leaves have effectively mummified - they have been standing on the window-sill of our old abandoned house since before we moved away from there, and that was ten years ago. I did slight modification in Lightroom and then followed Kim's recipe as such, until the scripted textures. The first scripted one, Sonnet 2, I blurred at 25 px Gaussian blur, to get only the tone from it, no text. Then I added Sonnet Magic at blend mode screen but turned down the opacity to 68% and masked out most of the script. I didn't add any photo filters, although that was part of the recipe, since I found that would have taken away all depth from my photo.

Withered

Resources:
- texture Sienna, Sonnet 2 & Sonnet Magic by Kim Klassen

Now to see if there'e enough for the birds to eat, when their last feeding rush for the evening starts. They have been crowding our feeding post ever since we started feeding them almost two weeks ago, and I have a feeling I need to do a refill, although I filled everything up to the brim in the morning.

Fragile

Fun for Friday evening: tackled Beyond Layers challenge for day 59. Kim shared a recipe and three textures for us to try out. The problem (for me, at least) with these challenges is the huge amount of time it takes to decide which photo to process. Ordinarily, you'd start building with a picture. Now I'm always looking at the kind of processing done and trying to find a photo I imagine could benefit from it. I never find anything similar to Kim's examples, but somehow I always have to try to match it at least on some level.

This is the third picture I tried this particular recipe on. In the end, I of course tweaked the recipe, but at least I started with it and used the texture, called Paper-Stained Music.

Fragile, c'est son nom

Resources:
- texture Paper-Stained Music by Kim Klassen

I took the photo in May in my little makeshift "studio". I have no idea what these flowers are called, but they opened beautifully from a bell-shape to this translucent disc, after standing for about two weeks in a vase. They were the last of the bouquet to survive.

The text on the picture just plopped from somewhere, when I was staring at the beautiful fragility of the flower on my screen. "Fragile, c'est son nom" I thought, and remembered things I did'nt know I remembered - it's a song by Patrick Juvet, which I suddenly remembered, too. Must be from somewhere early 1980s - the album was called Reves Immoraux, if I remember correctly. I think we had it on a C-cassette. I love how these things pop up, although I've been listening to Baroque Arias sung Andreas Scholl and Patricia Petibon the whole evening.

Sharing at Texture Tuesday.

Painting With Light

On day 58 at Beyond Layers Kim challenged us to watch another video lesson and either try the technique on a photo by her or on our own image, and of course I went for a photo of my own. The topic of the video was how to use light to draw focus on a subject.

With the dogs snoring around me this Saturday morning, I picked up a photo and started to process, following Kim's suggestions. This time I took a photo of Da Man about a month ago. He was sitting and watching by the back porch, with a dried yarrow funnily framing his face. Again, Kim's picture and mine were so different that I didn't create the effect she did for hers, but I do like what I got out of this picture with the recipe.

Dog and Yarrow

Photo taken on 7 September, 2013.

Resources:
- texture Heartfelt by Kim Klassen

Sharing at Texture Tuesday.

Quote Challenge revisited

After a good while, I decided I'd play along the quote challenge from Beyond Layers day 39 anyway. I had already had a look at some quotes, so I went back and did some digging for photos. Seeing the results, I'm happy I did.

First Tulips

A picture of the first tulips pushing up, taken on 2 May 2013. Thought the quote was pretty apt for the image. The prompt word was "life".

Resources:
- font KG Ways To Say Goodbye by Kimberly Geswein

Sleepers

The quote challenge word was "peace". This made me think of our latest little puppies when they were little puppies, in this picture less than a month old.

Resources:
- textures from Shadowhouse October Square Texture Set 2 by Jerry Jones
- font Learning Curve Pro by Blue Vinyl Fonts

Foxy - Indian Summer

On reading the prompt word "change" I knew immediately what my quote would be: Dorothy Parker's poem Indian Summer. Ever since I first read it I've loved the poem. And I roughly knew what I wanted to do with the images, too - originally I associate the poem with our second-ever Dandie, Veera, whom we called Madame, because she was very dignified, self-assured and definitely not one to fool with. She was a businesslike, no-nonsense personality, but charming. However, since she left us years before the age of digital cameras and even the scans I have of her are not of very high quality, the dog in the photos is our present Madame, called Foxy. Totally different, with a lot more sense of humour (yes, Dandies come equipped with that), but certainly a lady who knows what she wants, who turned nine this week. In the last picture, by the way, she is not growling but actually smiling.

Resources:
- template 018 by myself
- background papers from paper pack Green Finch and Linnet Bird by myself
- font Lavanderia by James T. Edmondson

By The Frozen River

The fourth prompt was "intentions" and for this, the Douglas Adams quote was my absolute favourite. It's so true for me in so many ways. The picture shows my home town since 1987, where I definitely didn't plan to move. When I first went to study, I somehow thought I'd end up in the south, Helsinki or thereabouts. And here I am, 600 kilometres north, and have been happy here for more than a quarter of a century. Oh my. I took the picture on a walk in the centre on 1 May this year. Yes, it was pretty cold.

Jackdaws

The last prompt was "focus". I like the quote, and the photo is one of a series I managed to take on 8 June of a gang of Jackdaws, who landed on the grass and  were a bit shy of me, obviously thinking the treat on the ground might belong to me. They circled around, trying to appear nonchalant and uninterested, until one of them started the approach. Unfortunately none of the photos I took of the actual attack turned out any good but well, that's life, right?

Type Tricks

Another Beyond Layers post. On day 56 at BL Kim offered us a couple of new tricks, how to type text on a path and how to create a rounded rectangular frame. With the latter technique I've been working for years already, so I just played with the type.

For this is used a photo taken at the barbershop singing course me and three of my vocal group friends attended at the beginning if June. It was taken by our new friend Reija during our extra, ladies-only evening rehearsal.

How We Sang

- texture Musiclovin by Kim Klassen
- texture Savor by Kim Klassen
- font Tipbrush Script by Måns Grebäck
- font KG This Is Not Goodbye by Kimberly Geswein

This afternoon, in fact, we had a first meeting of our new barbershop quartet, consisting of the oldest singers in our vocal ensemble. New, because we have never actually sung four-part harmony just the four of us together, and I have certainly not been singing the tenor part. We cleared half the piece we were rehearsing, dwelled on some of the chords over and over again just because they sounded sooo sweet, and concluded happily that we most definitely have learned something in the dozen or so years we have been singing together. Which is nice to notice.

More fences

The challenge of day 53 at BL was to watch a video lesson and try it on an image by Kim. I didn't see much point in simply copying what she had done, so I went straight to the second part, testing the recipe and techniques on an image of my own. It wasn't actually a spoken part of the challenge, but the underlying idea seemed to be fences, so I decided to try the techniques on a fence image.

First I found a fence picture related to my previous post about our re-fenced yard last autumn. It's a photo of the fence on the northern side of our yard after some snowfall last December. Tried Kim's techniques here, but not the recipe, since warming up a snowy picture didn't feel like a good idea.

Snowy Fence

Resources:
- framing action Simple by Chain

So I had to dig into the archives again, but after a while I found exactly what I needed: a photo of a fence around a church in Lübeck, photographed in May 2012. The dark fence against the red brick of the church was well suited for the warming and reddening Kim did in her recipe, so I used Kim's recipe almost as such, with minor adjustments, and followed the techniques as well.

Fence in Lübeck

Resources:
- texture Pumpkin Grunge by Kim Klassen

- framing action Simple by Chain

And on to posting the next challenge. I'm determined to get all this stuff posted so I can start working on something new.

Remembering

Got to day 51 at BL. Wow, I'm almost half-way through a course that actually finished five months ago. Go me.

This time the challenge was to use two of Kim's textures, Thursday and Yesteryear, and follow the recipe she gave on any image.

As the day I processed these photos marked the fourth anniversary of my father's death, I chose something that made me think of him as my first image. I took the photo when I was staying at father's flat after his death, helping my sister to clear it up. The flat never was a home to me, and only a few years to my father, but the objects there are soo familiar. I remember what meticulous care father took of the little flat, dusting and hoovering and tidying up and watering plants and washing each cup straight after use, and I remember teaching him to use the washing machine after mother died two years previously. There is the sofa and armchairs that used to belong to my grandmother and that father had reupholstered for her sometime in the seventies. There's the painting of the waterfall in our town - like all paintings in my parents' house, it was painted by an acquaintance. The painter was the boyfriend of our that time lodger, and I used to sit in their room and watch him paint and we'd talk about art. Father was very fond of the painting, me much less, but it was an essential part of the living room even in the old house. Here I followed Kim's recipe rather closely.

My Father's Living Room

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- photo frame by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- background paper Close to Ground 05 by myself

The second photo I tried the recipe on was chosen for similar reasons. It is a shot from my parents' summer cottage window, our second home in my childhood. It belongs to my sister now, and I was visiting the cottage quite probably for the last time in 2010. The July evening was like countless others I've spent there, except for the fact that I've never before been there all alone, not even waiting for anybody to arrive. The view is not what I would have seen as a child - the trees have grown, others have been cut down, the garden swing is a newer one. But the sauna and setting sun and lake are the same, as is the old bathtub grandmother started using as a flowerbed and the whole feel of the place.

Remembering Childhood Summers

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

I decided to try the recipe on a third photo as well. This is a recent one, I took it at the end of August when we were on our usual walk route with the dogs. I mainly wanted to see what the recipe would do to the blue sky of the original. Not bad. The feel is very much the same as in the previous image, although the originals differ quite a lot.

Path to River

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

A Tall Order

For day 50 at Beyond Layers we were asked to show where we live, and shoot landscapes in portrait format. I often do that, and originally I thought I'd pick something from the archives again.

But I didn't. For this challenge I actually didn't delve into my archives but instead took some time to go for a little walk to get some images of where I live. Not of the garden, not the doggies, but some shots on the riverside in the town centre.

As the opportunity more or less offered itself, I took it, and feel so good about it. About a month ago, I went to buy meat for the dogs from the truck the stops here every four weeks, and it was such a beautiful August evening. So instead of rushing home with the boxes of frozen meat in the boot of my car I took a few steps towards the river and took the first photos.

Riverside from Market Place

Process:
- ran action CoffeeShop 2020 by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- lowered layer opacity to 80% and masked out from the bottom
- applied texture Havana by Kim Klassen
- inverted texture colour and changed blend mode to 60% Color Dodge
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain

Then I grew even bolder - I drove a bit further along the riverside, parked the car for about ten minutes and walked to a park to take some photos towards the centre. I "wasted" perhaps a full fifteen minutes there, but it felt like a huge achievement. Which in a way it was, because I had taken a step out of my oh so well set ways.

Riverside Sunset

Process:
- straightened image in ACR
- corrected white balance in ACR
- ran action Fresh & Colourful by The Pioneer Woman
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain

Kim's Lilacs and our Dog

I'm posting days 44 and 45 of Beyond Layers here. In the day 44 challenge I was to process a photo by Kim to my liking. It was a pretty bunch of lilacs, and Kim seemed to have desaturated and toned down the original. I took another way and added more contrast and sharpness. This seems to be my way: adding clarity where I can, using bright colours. With a few exceptions, I don't seem to be too good at creating dreaminess or toning down - perhaps it just isn't my thing.

Here are both of the images side by side.

Here's the steps I took:
1 added texture 294 by Sirius-sdz
2 blurred the texture: Gaussian Blur 8 px
3 changed blending mode to soft light 100%
4 ran action Fresh & Colourful by The Pioneer Woman
5 changed action group opacity to 34%
6 added texture Now by Kim Klassen at Colour Burn 76%
7 added frame
8 resized image

Next I'll be off to see Kim's recipe to how she processed her own photo, I guess.

******

As I anticipated, on day 45 Kim shared how she processed her lilac image herself. But I have to say, I was astonished to realize she was sharing with us a technique I had just used in my own processing of her image! I swear I didn't have a peek at the video beforehand, just ended up using Gaussian blur on the texture on my own.

Anyway I decided to have another go according to Kim's suggestions. I picked up a photo taken of our youngest Dandie Justiina, taken on 29 May this year, when she was a bit over a year and a half. She's like many Dandies we've had in that she'll often stare right at you and the camera when you're taking a picture. Often, that is. Usually not when you'd absolutely want her to.

Here I kept the added noise Kim suggested at a minimum, added Gaussian blur to the first texture so that it only gave me the lighting and none of the actual texture, then added another texture for a painterly effect.

Resources used:
- texture Cool Grunge by Kim Klassen at soft light 100%
- texture Paint on Canvas II by Kerstin Franck at overlay 77%
- framing action Double by Chain

What I didn't do here was adding type and then adding gradient to the text, that'll have to wait for some other time, perhaps when I do some scrapbooking?

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.

This & That

Day 41 of Beyond Layers offered two challenges that I totally enjoyed doing. Again, where I started from was not at all what Kim did, and I didn't want to create dreaminess, but used her recipe to add crispness and clarity to the photo. Here Misaki is standing at the front door, staring at me wide-eyed like she often does, asking me if I really mean what I'm telling her. So herself here, that's what she's like with her large nose and big dark eyes under the topknot.

Serious?

Here's what I did to this image:
1 duplicated bg layer
2 added gradient map Pinkish by Kim Klassen, at soft light 100%
3 added a b&w gradient map at normal 30%
4 created text layer, font Shardee by Bright Ideas, applied stroke, turned fill to 19%
5 duplicated text layer, deleted stroke, turned fill back to 100%, set the text slightly off
6 flattened image & resized it for web
7 added frame: framing action Glass by Chain

The second image was an exercise in enlargening the canvas and using gradient fill. The photo is a detail of my belated birthday bouquet that I received last autumn. Since I was quite happy with the photo itself, I didn't do any processing to the actual photo, only enlarged the canvas, created and used a gradient fill and added the text. Can you tell warm orange is my favourite colour? Then I decided I'd like it better with a frame, so I made one using an action by WallStorm.

Editing steps:
1 used crop tool to make image canvas wider than original
2 created gradient fill (my own, warm orange)
3 added text layer with font La Belle Aurore by Kimberly Geswein, blending mode Vivid Light 64%
4 flattened image & resized it
5 added frame: framing action White Frame V4 from Photographer's Toolkit 2 by WallStorm

I'm very happy with both results here. Feels good to be achieving something satisfying with my pictures. And with two of my favourite photography subjects, too - dogs and flowers.

Off stage

After a month on stage, I get back to the blog. First, there was our vocal ensemble concert & sing-along event, then in a few days, the Oriental Dance show where I was not dancing like my friends but acted as the hostess,  then a couple of weeks after that, my basic level vocal recital at the music school.

Now this is day 37 -- since the original course of Beyond Layers expired without my having time to finish it, I took on the challenge of Beyond Beyond with the access to the original BL, too. But here's a snag: MY course, BL2, was not available, so I had to take BL1. Mostly the same, but still a bit different, so I find myself going back to day 37 again. Oh well.

Anyway, here Kim gave a challenge of placing a photo inside bulky text. I had a look at this technique about a month ago, just before the concert our vocal ensemble gave this spring, so I made an "ad" of the concert for fb with the technique. I am rather pleased with the result. The picture is from our concert in 2011, and at the moment we were singing California Dreamin - which I thought was rather apt, since Kim's tutorial had California in it, too.

Vocal Ensemble Nais-Girls on stage

The original image was a video capture, awfully dark, so I processed it as follows:
- Levels adjustment preset Lighten Shadows
- Curves adjustment to cut down the yellows
- added my own texture Mute Light 01 at Screen 72%

Then I created a new document, following the tutorial, but added another layer of the same font with the words "on stage", at 66% Hard Light. That way I could display a bit more of the original picture.

Resources:
- my own textures Mute Light 01 & Mute Light 02
- font Gill Sans Ultra Bold
- font Respective by Måns Grebäck

Into the Light

Here I'm posting a couple of images I worked with for day 36 at Beyond Layers. By now the ecourse is finished, except that I got myself extra time to get through all of this. I really want to finish the course, even though there are still almost 70 challenges waiting. But the way to tackle them is, naturally, one by one.

The challenge this time was to shoot into the light. When I originally took up the challenge, it was December, and shooting into the light was rather impossible, with so little light available at any time. Anyway, I managed to get  this shot of a dried-up cow parsley with snow flakes clinging to it. Then I started to follow Kim's tutorial, but had to deviate quite a lot, since my image was so different from hers.

Into the Light

Resources:
- texture 3112 by Kim Klassen, masked with a sunburst brush by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog

Then I decided I needed an image that was at least somehow related to the whiteness of Kim's image and took a close-up of this white poinsettia we had received for Christmas. Here I managed to use both the tutorial and the textures provided so that they actually improved the original. I cut out the numbers from the overlay, though, since I didn't like them at all. But I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.

White Poinsettia

Resources:
- overlay 123 by Kim Klassen
- texture Softly by Kim Klassen

Is it really any wonder it takes me so much time to get through these challenges, when I have to do at least two takes on everything? But then, if that's my way to learn, so be it.