Mixed post, catch up

Things seem to be moving pretty fast since we all returned to normal after Christmas. I'm just getting used to the routine of having 2 dedicated creative days (DCD's) a week, which I am trying to be very professional about and not do anything unnecessary like answering the phone/e-mails, checking the blogs (that's a tricky one) till at least after 7.0pm!

Then there's all that forward planning to be done re possible exhibition venues and of course the C&G rumbling away in the background, and the lovely Callendar Girls, hummm! I think I may be over-stretching myself yet again. Oh! and then there's work to be fitted in somewhere!

So here's a bit of a catch up on a few things.



Firstly I received this beautiful post card from Susan.It's a beautiful sunny post card which has done wonders to cheer me up every morning since I received it. The colours and the stitching are superb. If you'd like to see more go to the Calendar Girls blog and you'll see how Susan designed and made it, as it's her January post card for this challenge.

The second lovely thing that happened was that I received the 'You make my day award' from Shirley, thank you so much, I'm very flattered. There are lots more people that I would like to nominate for this award, but as I've just handed out a few maybe I should stay quiet for a bit LOL.

And now for a bit of the creative stuff!
I've been having a think about the February post card for the CG challenge and this is what I've got so far:



I decided to work with just part of the source image (see above) for the February post card and cropped the left hand side quite tight.
I then put it into PS and worked a watercolour tutorial from, Photo Effects Cookbook by Tim Shelbourne. This tutorial was designed to convert a photograph into a watercolour. The effects I have created are a little different as I started out with a watercolour sketch, but I wanted to see if I could make the original image a bit more textured.




Half way through this process you had to go to Image-Adjustments-Invert, which inverts the colours in the image.
I liked the effect so much that I copied this layer to another file and created a gradient fill underneath it, as it wasn’t the right format for the post card.

Having done this I decided it needed something more so I took the text from the original source and laid down random sentences.

As a final touch I selected the main bloom, pasted it in the right hand corner and set the opacity to 52% .





I'm now thinking I might print this onto some Extravaganza that I recently bought from AVG on a rather expensive shopping outburst! So I've copied the text and small bloom layers on to an A4 file and done the same with the flower and BG layers, so that I can lay one over the other. So I shall see if it works tomorrow!