Looking now.
Meantime, I am also coming up with a sketch for the May Card Sketch Challenge so doing two things at once. You will probably see during the photos for this blog post that my screen is absolutely chock full of all kinds of different goodies. Actually I have made all kinds of progress already but if I add the screen shot of the card sketch challenge it would make you all rush out to play!!!
Cherry Blossoms - evoke all shades of pink! Normally I am not a pink person so to speak unless it is the really vibrant neon pink like the one from Fizz!! Anyway here goes with my creation for this month.
Open up ALL the kit components and a blank 12" x 12" canvas with a transparent background at 300 ppi.
I must explain that I actually have a minor technical issue here in that everything is opening as a smart object. Smart objects in photoshop are really cool. What they do is allow you to do everything in a non-destructive manner within the program. That means that anything you do will preserve the original as made/shot/created etc.
Anyway above you can see everything in the kit.
Now to the fun part. (Still looking for appropriate photo(s) on my external drives.
Well I found a photo! Not quite what I was expecting to work with but I think you will see why.
Now that I have my picture, I decided that I wanted to make it blend with whatever my background is going to be so I found a mask in my stash and played around with it until it worked with my photo and here is the clipping mask used with the photo.
I think that I have too much blue-ish sky to the right of the mountain which is the Matterhorn in Switzerland so i will erase some of it. To do this, use a fuzzy brush at a lowish flow and opacity. Since I am working with smart objects, I have to rasterize before making any modifications to any of the layers.
Here is the finished making process.
You will see that I have taken out some of the color on either side of the mountain.
Now I want to make my background.
Well that did not happen. This happened instead.
Back to my background. I selected the one I wanted and placed it beneath my masked photo.
I think that it is a bit too purple for this photo so I am going to do some tinting. You will see that I have made the top and the bottom a bit better blended by brushing with an art brush in colors selected from the photo. Pinkish at the top and blue at the bottom. I also kept the opacity and flow fairly low so that the original background would be visible through my brushwork.
Now I am starting to play with embellishments. I have added a stamped word and one of the beautiful cherry blossom flower branches.
Still doing trial and error with embellishments - here is the next part.
I now think that I have done what I want with this layout. There are added drop shadows on the cherry blossoms and also the word. The word also has a stroke and outer glow and the cut out has an applied drop shadow.
Above is the completed layout. I do hope you have enjoyed my creative process for this.
