Joy : Week 24 Let's Do 52

This shot deserved it's own post.  Why not link it up with JOY?

I guess it also shows the uses of reflected light to bring out the colors.  This is much brighter and more vivid than the whole quilt pictures we took.  

I made a quilt for the birth of a close friend's first grandchild. This is the view of it inside the washing machine after it had gone through a cycle. This is how I want to remember this quilt. It is a JOY to welcome a child into the family. A joy to see my friend become a Grandmother; and a JOY to be able to make a quilt to welcome the child. It is a JOY to create ... and a JOY to recognize precious moments like this one.

I was also thinking about the other things that bring me Joy -- my dog (ALL my big black dogs), my family, creating ... making ...    Back in the day Figure / Ice Skating brought me a tremendous amount of JOY, too.  The joy of moving, of flying like the wind, of mastering the physical forces so you could defy gravity ...  But I wasn't sure how to get a photo of that.  It's much more about FEELING for me than watching, or knowing anyone up close whom I could photograph.

SO you'll have to settle for the joyous quilted visual above.  ;-)

And now a joyful musical accompaniment :



Tommy Shaw - Sing for the Day

Stevie Winwood's Higher Love

I am participating in Denise Love's 2017 "Let's Do 52 : 52 Weeks of Photo Prompts" to kick start the lull in my photography.   If you'd like to join us, find out more at the link above.  The more the merrier!

Golden Dreams and a Dragonfly

It's been a while since I posted a photograph worked up with layers in PSE.  And I thought it was about time I actually DID something with these textures I've been creating ...  Hence this Golden Dreams Dragonfly was born on a rainy Saturday afternoon!

Layer 1)  I started with one of the gelatine print textures from last week.
I call this one Golden Dreams.   I doctored up the upper right corner before I set to work with the rest. 
Layer 2) Swirling Snowflake Brush by Linda Nelson at Pixel Berry Pie  in the corners - Overlay Blend Mode at  67% opacity
Layer 3) Dragonfly Brush (my own!) - Soft Light 100%

Although there are some free dragonfly brushes out there, they were too small to fill the space I needed, so I made my own from this picture of a real life specimen who happened into my vicinity a few years ago.   I'm really happy with the way it turned out!

Layer 4) Copy Layer 3 - Soft Light 80%
Layer 5)  Obsidian Dawn Swirl Brushes in the corners - Soft Light 100% (added last)
Layer 6) Text : Dream- Change-Joy - Zapfino Font - Overlay 65%
I looked up the symbolic meaning of Dragonfly, and these were some of the key ideas.  How's that for a positive spin on change?  After some input from a thoughtful friend in Sweden, I changed the words a bit to the modified version at the top of this post.  The original words were : Dream, Joy, Change.  I thought Dream-Imagine-Create elevated this piece even higher.   Here's the first version :

Layer 7) Color Fill Frame (a la Kim Klassen) - black - Soft Light 65%

Sharing with The Texture Artist's Facebook Group. 

Sharing with Texture Artists FaceBook Group.

Sharing with Texture Artists FaceBook Group.