Wednesday, April 6, 2016

CS Blog Hop April 2016 - Dahlia

This month I was somewhat taken aback by the beautiful artwork that was created for the Dahlia kit. Normally I do not go for water color type flowers but this kit is really lovely particularly because of the colors used.

That being said, I am not entirely sure that I am going to use this extremely vibrant color palette. Today is 6th April and I have been thinking about this month's NBUS challenge a lot.  Pam is asking us to use a stamp or stencil that makes us think of rain.

Open up a new blank 12" x 12" canvas at 300ppi on a transparent background.
























I actually have several photos which I shot in Venice while it was raining so thought to use one or two of them for this challenge.

























Open up your background and in this case I have recolored the chosen one to a more green hue to almost mimic a rainy and stormy feel.

























Of course you can tweak it to your hearts content using the eyedropper tool.  This is what I ended up with.

























I think it has a good and stormy feel to it but now  I want to blend the photo into the background to make it look like the whole background is watery.  To do this I use a combination of masking and erasing using textured brushes.  The result is

























At this point, I have opened up everything Dahlia in my Adobe Bridge.

























As you can see the layout is taking shape now.  I have added a recolored embellishment and a music score stamp and script stamp as well.

























Now I want to make the whole page look like it is raining!

To do that, I have to find a stamp that says "rain" to me.  I am going to use a stamp from Aurora Borealis which I think will work.  Off to experiment a bit!

What I ended up doing was making a brush out of the stamp using edit>define brush preset and then making the brush extremely big.  At this point I dropped the opacity to something that looked like grey rain to me and then swiped this brush a couple of times on separate layers above the photo but below the embellishment.  I then added a soft drop shadow and emboss.

























I hope you can see the rain like grey brush work above.

Now all I have to do is add a title and I thought I would use some of the water drops from Castaway and complete the layout.

























Here is the final layout.  I hope you all enjoy my rainy day in Venice and I also hope that this meets the challenge criteria for NBUS this month.  I posted the layout when I completed it to give you all a small taste of making use of stamps in a slightly different way.


10 comments:

  1. Wow, the result is really stunning,Annette: Venice in the rain.
    This city is still on my bucket list. I do hope we will have better weather when we visit.

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    1. Thank you Hetty. I actually prefer Venice when it is raining because there are much less people out and about and you can really enjoy seeing more.

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  2. Annette, I love how you altered the background colors! Love the stormy look and feel. Beautiful!

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  3. Nice job altering the kit to fit the picture and challenge! It is a lovely layout.

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  4. Wow, fun to see your results as usual! Very nice combination you've created here!

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  5. Bless your heart Kay. Thank you very much.

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  6. This is so cool! Love how you changed the colors!
    Lilian
    The Leaf Studio

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