Au Naturel, and Dodging and Burning

I think the pressure of the contest has been getting to me! Now that I have a couple days' respite, my layout designing is flowing again...

Promised you some gorgeous pictures from our explorations the other day, and here they are! Allen and I went to swim together on Sunday up in Newport, and then since it was so gorgeous and a bonus sun day (the weather forecast had predicted rain), we decided to explore a little. I'd seen this lighthouse in the distance from our forays on Nye Beach, and we went looking for it. Sure am glad we found it! Oh, and YaQUINa is pronounced like "quintuple"--old First People name. Fonts: Penguin and Bernhard Modern Standard. Journaling reads: "Just you and I, exploring on a glorious sunny day. We met Clement the Keeper, climbed 120 stairs, gazed at the amazing lighting mechanism, and read about rendered pig oil, which they used to store in 800 gallon tanks. Poor pigs. Now, they use electricity. The land is amazing -- ancient lava flow from 500 miles away!"



And this second one is another in my All Designer Digitals series (heh)-- do click on the image to find all the credits:



I think I'm finally getting the hang of this patterned paper thing! And I'm really pleased with the way that word art came out -- even the "saying" is mine! *lol* I'm not sure how it can really be a saying or a quote if I made it up, but oh well... =)

I submitted this for the dodging and burning challenge this week @ 2Peas, also. The original photo was fine, but nothing special. So I changed it into black and white, but the the contrast was terrible: the grass in the background was the same color as his jacket, and the right side of his body was disappearing into the pier. So I dodged the heck out of it. Still wasn't peppy enough, so then I thought maybe I could make it pop by duplicating and setting the top one to screen, but that didn't do a thing. So.... (long story short): put a lighting effect on it to highlight the contrast, changed both of them to brown, set the top one to color burn, then additionally, burned the areas in the upper left corner and on his hand and arm where the details were completely washed out. Turned out kinda funky, I think! I used the color burn on almost everything--I love how it grunges up the color all by itself.

Quickie

I'm hoping to spend a lot of time with Allen today. What with going to bed way late last night, and getting up early (though losing an hour because of daylight savings! Grrrr.), I didn't have time to do much this morning...

For the 2Peas challenge using burn & dodge tools -- the inset picture was really washed out from the backlight of the sun, so I used the burn tool there to get it crisper. And the dodge tool over Allen's front, to make it more visible... By the way, I found out that if I used a fairly large, grungy brush, it looks a lot better than with a smooth one! Font: Architecture. Journaling reads:


"fingers
rake
dust
sand
pebbles
lift
pour
lift
pour
contemplate"

More Challenges

A couple more challenges for Designer Digitals, one for the Ad Challenge (using Lynn Grieveson's Template), and the other for the Quote Challenge (with Katie Pertiet's wordart).

The quote challenge was really a challenge for me--not for using the quote, but because I ended up adding all this stuff and couldn't decide where to put it, whether it fit together or not, and whether I really liked it! I basically gave up on it, not knowing where it was going. Lots of blending work, and layer masks, and a little creative starring. It all began with that fantastic (well, I think so *lol*) photo I happened to catch yesterday, with, serendipitously, the moon high up:



The fun part for the template challenge ended up being those little suns descending on the lower third of the page--really easy to make! Use a new layer, and with a large black brush with lots of spacing, stroke a descending arc path. Then select them with the magic wand, and start distressing them--change the color, dodge & burn, add some highlights. Give them a very broad shadow--and now you have an extra little motif that was way easy to do! Remember to click on the photos to get the credits: