International Art and Soul Challenge 78

The challenge for this fortnight is one I found hard: Use a Photo. I found it hard because I don't like to post photos. I use them when crafting, but since they're normally of people, I don't then put them on my blog. So, I had to do some thinking.

And here's the photo I chose. Not at all personal!

When I got a new laptop, I decided to say goodbye to Photoshop Elements which I've used for many years and try Gimp instead. Let's say the learning curve has been rather steep, and I've barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. But I've tried hard to work out how to do some of the things I used to do regularly, and one of my favourites is making a background out of an area of an image. I often do that when I want a background for a digital image, but I've never used one of my own photos before. So, I digitally cropped a small section of the flowers above, shrank the cropped image, mirrored it so that the edges all matched, and tiled it to make a background. And this was the result!

I printed the result on to photo paper, and with the addition of a stamped image and some matting, this was the final result.

The background to the image was shaded with Distress Oxide inks, and then I stamped the image (stamp from a recent issue of Creative Stamping) and embossed it in white. I added a little green to the leaves, brown to the trunk and red to the pendants using Promarkers and completed the card with a little lace.

And that's it. I hope you can join us this time. So long as you use a photo, it doesn't matter how you use it!