Crafty Cardmakers Challenge 27 - Birthday

It's the Crafty Cardmakers Challenge Blog's birthday this week, and that's our theme for challenges. And for the spotlight week, we're looking at ... spotlights!

There was talk among the DT about how the spotlight technique would best suit the traditional stampers in our midst. Now, while I do rubber stamp, I've got to say, I prefer the flexibility (and lack of mess) of digital techniques, so I set myself the challenge of doing a digital spotlight.

Before I'd ever heard of 'digital stamps', I was struggling with my rubber stamping technique. I saw the amazing results people got and I wanted to do the same thing, but I just couldn't get it right. Then I reasoned that I should be able to find digital images that I could use as stamps, and when I searched online, I came across a company called Dover Books. What's more, if you sign up to their list, they'll send you a sampler every week. I bought two of their books/CDs, and it's from their Arts and Crafts collection that I got the image I used here. It's a rather attractive line drawing of some fish in a pool, and it seemed ideal for this technique.

The first thing I did was to copy a circle of the whole to a separate document in Photoshop Elements, and then I coloured it in various shades of turquoise and orange, using the magnetic lasso to define the areas. There are actually more shades involved than are apparent on the photograph, and considering the small area, I could have coloured it with Promarkers a whole lot faster!

Then, I went back to the main image, and I did a gradient fill from pale turquoise through to pale grey, with the centre of the circular gradient close to the centre of the spotlight area, and added the coloured spotlight to fit the rest. I printed those two images on my favourite Ryman Matte coated photo paper, printing several copies of the spotlight. The next thing was to take the main image and fill it with a similar gradient to previously, but with stronger colours. Then, I took a section of it, mirrored both horizontally and vertically, and used it as a tile for a background. I printed this on the same Ryman paper, along with a sentiment.

I used some orange paper from my collection, and then added the image, assembling three layers of the spotlight on the base image - the whole coloured area, a smaller area including the fish, and just the fish. I finished the card with some flowers from Wild Orchid Crafts, and I was done.

I'd like to enter the card in the following challenges:

Party Time Tuesdays for which 'anything goes' but it has to have a birthday sentiment, and
Tuesday Throwdown which is spotlighting the 'Spotlight' technique!