Colour Storyboards

Beyond Layer challenge for day 49 was to make something Kim calls a colour-storyboard. She offered two tutorials to do this.

Following the first tutorial, I sampled colours from a bouquet I photographed in April. On our way home from celebrating Marjo's birthday, we visited this Home, gardening and interior design fair at Helsinki Exhibition and Convention Centre. One event there was a bouquet auction, and this was one of the bouquets on display.

Bouquet

The processing steps were pretty simple:
1 blurred image: Gaussian blur 26,0 px
2 masked out blur from the bouquet
3 ran action Springtime by NightFateActions
4 enlarged canvas and made swatches
5 applied pattern overlay to swatches

My take on the second tutorial already ended up in use: this photo of a rose turned into a thank-you card for my fb friends after my birthday. I loved the whimsical splatter brushes and thought they brought a nice touch to the otherwise calm photo.

Processing steps:
1 enlarged canvas
2 made colour splatters with brushes by Dustin Schmieding
3 added texture Sunkissed by Kim Klassen at color burn 42%
4 typed text in Finnish, font KG Somebody That I Used to Know by Kimberly Geswein
5 typed text in English, font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein
6 flattened image
7 ran framing action Shadow by Chain

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.

Texture Tuesday - Something Orange

Autumn's in full swing, I'm busy working and have had little time to spare for the last-in-line hobby of playing with photos. Popped in at Kim's blog on Tuesday for the Texture Tuesday challenge to see if there was anything in there for me, and I had to laugh out loud. Something orange should definitely be easy enough for me, as orange is my favourite colour.

Since most everyone else seemed to tackle the challenge by displaying beautiful flowers and autumnal trees, I decided to take a different approach and have a look at my wardrobe, or actually some accessories. Here's my take on "something orange": my wellies, designed by Ristomatti Ratia, my bright orange raincoat and the shoulder bag I bought in Lübeck last spring. All wonderful to wear on rainy days, by the colour alone they make me feel warm and they also make the day look brighter. What's not to love?

At the Door

What I used here:
- texture Dream It by Kim Klassen
- texture Paper and Paste by Kim Klassen
- mask by Krizomel
- background paper Cold Spell 5 by myself

Autumn Gear

Resources:
- texture To Be by Kim Klassen
- gradient Autumn 12 by ElvenSword
- font Luismi Murder by Juan Casco

And here's my recipe for Autumn Gear:
- cropped image
- duplicated background, applied Gaussian Blur at 11,5 px, created layer mask, brushed out the blur from the gear, changed layer opacity to 35%
- created Hue/Saturation adjustment layer: greens saturation -35, lightness +48
- added Kim Klassen's texture To Be at blending mode soft light 100%
- duplicated texture, turned layer -90°, adjusted blending mode to colour burn 63%, then added black & white adjustment layer (preset neutral density)
- added gradient map adjustment layer Autumn 12 by Elven Sword at blending mode soft light 100%
- brushed in watermark
- wrote text, font Luismi Murder

I fully intend to go on with Beyond Layers, too, as soon as possible. Here's to hoping it'll actually be soon.

Splashes of Red

Time for the Beyond Layers fifth and last day of the Colour Week. The colour this time was red, and I'm still in Salzburg in these pictures. As a matter of fact, when making these assignments I realized that it's not a bad idea to build scrapbooking layouts from a certain place or event around a specific colour. So far I've always done things strictly chronologically, but why should one? This is a nice-looking way to show the pictures, too.

I've stacked here lots of memories - the Oriental gift shop where we were so well attended to, the piles on piles of Mozart bath ducks, the Promenade concert that was cut short by the thunderstorm, the puppets of the Marionetten Theater, the street sign of the Mozart dinner concert we attended on my birthday, the cafe where we had breakfast the same day, not to mention the local fashions we window-shopped. How come so many of those clothes were red, actually?

Seeing Red in Salzburg

Thank you for the resources:
- template 2012-002 by Scrap'Anges
- background paper from Bruissement de Yin Bruissement de Yang by Au coin de l'objectif
- gradient by Digital Phenom

Splashes of Red in Salzburg

Resources used:
- template Avril by Pim
- paper from Close to Ground by myself
- gradient by Digital Phenom

Wow. That was a fun template, with frames for no less than 26 pictures! And with this I declare my Colour Week closed. It has taken me twelve days to finish this "week", but I'm awfully pleased with the results, and don't regret that I did it the long way, concentrating on each day at a time. I have to admit, however, that I also look forward to tackling something new. Day 21, here I come!

Blue Skies Smiling at Me

For Beyond Layers Day 20, the fourth day of the Colour Week, I collected blue skies and other things from our trip to Salzburg at the end of July. It was a wonderful holiday, we enjoyed all of it, even the part where we first got soaking wet in a sudden thunder storm that started during an open-air concert in the Mirabell Gardens, rushed into one of the buses we usually took and then realized it was not going where we were, and when the wind blew Better Half's brand new Panama hat onto the pavement and a friendly young man managed to catch it…

I loved skimming through the pictures for some beautiful and memorable blueness, most of it the sunny kind, although there are some watery bits as well.

Helsinki-Salzburg, July 2012

Playing with Pink

Am continuing the Beyond Layers Week of Colour. The third colour was pink, and at Better Half's suggestion, I tackled it the same way as yellow, taking photos with the phone, instead of using the archives. So all the pictures were taken yesterday, 18 August. There was no shortage of pink around the house, either. Bedroom wallpaper, mugs, iPad cover, puncher, gardening shoes, bedsheets, dog toys…  Originally, I was rather uncertain about whether to call all these colours pink, but then I had a look at the Wikipedia article called Variations of pink and was satisfied. Yes, they can all be called pink.

Here are the pictures, as three scrapbook layouts. In addition to showing variations of the colour pink, this way I feel I'm also recording our everyday through some objects around the house.

Playing with Pink - Flowers

Used:
- template by myself
- texture Awaken by Kim Klassen
- gradient by Digital Phenom
- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Playing with Pink - Mixture

Resources:
- template by myself
- textures Aurora & Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen

- gradients by Digital Phenom

- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Playing with Pink - This & That

Credits:
- template by Scrapsvoyages
- texture Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen

- gradient by Digital Phenom
- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Looking for Yellow

I'm continuing my week (or so) of colour for Beyond Layers.The first day was green, this one is yellow. On the 13 August, when Better Half had left for work, I was having my second or third cup of tea in the kitchen and staring at the yellow mug in front of me. I then realized there was a multitude of various shades of yellow all around me, and so, although I only have my phone to take photos with at the moment (see previous post), I was inspired to try and do this challenge by photographing yellow instead of digging it up from my archives.

And no, it really was no problem. It took me a little more than half an hour to walk around the house and the garden to get a shocking number of pictures with yellow. There were so many that in the end I was quite happy to see that quite a few of them were out of focus (note to self: keep your distance - mustn't try to get too close to the objects because the phone, without a macro function, will just blur the pics).

I thought it would be fun to collect them into storyboards to show as many as possible. In the end, I managed to squeeze the half-hour walk to three pages, one from the house, two from the garden - one with flowers, the other with… well, other things. Here they are.

A Day of Yellow - Outdoors

A Day of Yellow - Flowers

A Day of Yellow - Indoors

What I did with the photos was to process all of them in Camera Raw before placing them in the storyboard. After that I used a gradient layer (soft light) for each storyboard to even the colours a tad.

Resources used:
- templates by Miya J, myself and Margote
- gradients by Digital Phenom

What fun that was! Then off to tackle the next colour.

A Week of Colour

Beyond Layers, Week 9. This is a week of colour (for me, that is, most of the group already did this eight weeks ago). The challenge is to focus on photographing a certain colour every day for a week, or actually, five days. *AAARGH* if you'll excuse my expressing myself like this.

The big aaaargh here is that I lost my camera in Salzburg. Should I say, it went missing in action. I could even claim that an Allosaurus ate it. Don't really know what happened, really. I still have the camera, but it just won't work. We were in the Haus der Natur, the natural history museum, and as usual, I was snapping here and there, and then suddenly, after I had taken a picture of Better Half scratching the chin of a Tyrannosaurus skull and another one of the Allosaurus there, something happened. When I tried to switch the camera on again, the lens just came half-way out and got stuck. After that, it hasn't been working. After spending time in the suitcase on our two flights back from Salzburg, the lens had retracted again, but when I (hoping against hope) tried to switch it on again, it beeped of malfunction and that was it.

Then Better Half thought of the old camera that has just been sitting on the shelf for a few years, but it turns out something's wrong with it, too. Seems it has been gathering dust for too long to be operational anymore - I can see nothing on the display, and when I try to take a photo anyway, it's mostly black. So no solution there either. All I have now is my phone to take photos with, and I'm feeling seriously deprived.

So, I'll settle to digging into my archives for the photos instead of photographing especially for the purpose. Some people in the group had followed the example of Xanthe and created storyboards, I think I'll follow suit.

Green - Summer 2012

For this storyboard I decided to pick different kinds of green things (read: not to have plants all over the place) and restrict myself to things photographed this summer. The pictures were taken in Dunfermline, Lübeck, Salzburg, Vienna and, exotically, inside our car.

Resources used:
- template 09 by Isa
- scotch tape from Bruissements Lointains by Au coin de l'objectif
- splash mask from Doux Bruissements by Au coin de l'objectif
- font Blokletters Viltstift by LeFly Fonts
- font Chalkduster

As an afterthought I decided to post another green picture as well, just because I like the particular photo. And yes, it is a plant. I took it on 13 July of a Lady's Mantle growing in our garden. I love their tiny, gentle, light green flowers. Not a lot of processing this time, just adjusted the levels a tad, added the text and made the frame.

Lady's Mantle

Resources used:
- font Windsong by Bright Ideas
- font Bank Gothic Light

And now off to tackle the rest of the to-do things for today.