Art Deco Butterfly Freebie

It looks as if Spring is on its way at last. The days are getting longer, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the daffodils are blooming all over the garden. All that´s missing are the butterflies.

Sorry. My mistake. Here they come fluttering by.

If you´d like this little celebration of Spring, you´ll find the link HERE.

Wha´s Like Us?

I´ve just been listening to a BBC documentary in which James Naughtie tells the story of an audacious raid carried out on Christmas Day 1950. Three young men and one woman removed the Stone of Destiny from under King Edward I's Chair in Westminster Abbey, where it had lain since its removal from Scone in Scotland in 1296. The exploit brought the cause of Scottish independence to the front pages. To this day, the Stone, now installed in Edinburgh Castle, remains a symbol of the pride of Scotland in its nationhood. It roused my Scottish blood and reminded me of this toast by our national poet, Robert Burns, which usually precedes the imbibing of large quantities of our most famous alcoholic beverage.

Here’s tae us.

Wha’s like us?

Damn few,

And they’re a’ deid,

Mair’s the pity!

May those who live truly be always believed,

And those who deceive us be always deceived.

Here’s to the men of all classes,

Who through lasses and glasses

Will make themselves asses!

I drink to the health of another,

And the other I drink to is he,

In the hope that he drinks to another,

And the other he drinks to is me.

Then let us toast John Barleycorn,

Each man a glass in hand,

And may his great prosperity

Ne’er fail in old Scotland!

This inspired the following list of the many inventions and innovations created by Scotsmen. If you´re not Scottish, some of these may surprise you!

 Click to enlarge

Here´s the unadorned list:

the raincoat

tar road surface

car tyres

the telephone

the bicycle

television

the U.S. Navy

the first authorised translation of the bible

whisky

the breech-loading rifle

penicillin

chloroform

the Bank Of England

 

Wha´s like us?

Damn few and they´re a´deid.....indeed!

Calendar Girl

This is the front of this year´s Dora calendar. I have one made for her doting daddy every year. Last year was very stressful for him so this year I hope that he´ll have more peace and relaxation. I wish the same for you.

Won´t You Guide My Sleigh Tonight?

The Red-Nosed What?

Christmas In August

As some of you may know, I spent much of the summer laid up with sciatica. The only place this condition was tolerable for me was in the garden where I spent a lot of time in a mainly reclining position alternately blessing my iPod and my ebook reader for providing distraction from boredom and discomfort. After a while though even that wasn´t enough for me so I hobbled back into the house, hunted out my needles, threads and patterns and started cross stitching some Christmas cards. I suppose it seems strange to even think of Christmas in August but even these little motifs take some considerable time to stitch, especially for someone like me who can never stick to the colours specified in the colour key or even to the chart itself.

Take this chart for example. It´s supposed to be an angel but whoever designed it seems to have got a little confused because it´s the only Christmas chart I have in which the angel is carrying a magic wand.

That was easy to alter with a wave of my own magic wand.

I liked the result so much that I ended up making several, though as you can see, I hardly stuck to the colour key at all. These are a few of the finished cards.

 

Another motif I enjoyed stitching was this one.

It offered so much scope for change that I got a bit carried away. First of all I decided to add a glittering star to each tree and also to add sparkly thread to the trees themselves. Unfortunately the effect doesn´t show up on a scanned image so you´ll have to take my word for that. Here´s the first one I made.

I went on to make quite a few after that simply because I enjoyed changing the colours each time. These are just a few of them all framed and ready to go.

 

Of course, stitching them is the fun part. Actually finishing them i.e. washing, pressing, lining, cutting them out and finally creating cards to frame them is something else again so I´ll draw a veil over the hard part!

Creating these little motifs was a sort of therapy for me. It helped me to feel as if I was doing something useful and not just self-indulgently lounging around on the lawn all summer. Which reminds me, even in November the lawn is beckoning me. Well, not so much the lawn itself as Dora who´s waiting there for me to join her in a game of her own invention called something like I-might-let-you-kick-this-football-but-only-if-you-ask-nicely. I always do and she usually does...

Surreal Blending Effects

I love creating photo collages and I particularly enjoy extracting parts of photos, adding them to others and experimenting with the various Photoshop blending options to transform them into something more interesting than any of the original photos. I find that many of these photo collages can turn into something quite spooky and surreal simply by changing either the blending mode and/or the opacity. Add to that my enjoyment of taking photos in Scottish cemeteries and the obvious conclusion is that many of my photos lend themselves to the creation of layouts that reflect the more sinister aspects of Halloween. Don´t get me wrong. I´m no ghoul but the ancient Celtic crosses to be found in old cemeteries are so intricate and beautiful in a stern sort of way that I can never resist the temptation of adding yet another to my collection of Celtic art. At this point I´ve got to say that I´m no expert and what looks fairly easy to achieve is often the result of painstaking experimentation. The Halloween collage in my previous post is a good example of this. If you´re a beginner and if you also enjoy the challenge of creating collages and would like to find out how I went about it, read on.

I started off with a white background to which I added the Lightning background paper from an old kit of mine called Fright Night which I long ago consigned to my virtual attic to – appropriately – gather dust and cobwebs. I´ve since blown off the dust and frightened the spiders away in order to use various parts of it in this layout, the following background paper for example.

 

I didn´t want it quite so dense and I also wanted to discard the colour so I altered the blending mode to Luminosity.

 

Then, from the same old kit I added a full moon.

Now I´m putting the cart before the horse because I also used the following very underexposed photo of the Glasgow Art Galleries...

 

...but I didn´t actually use it immediately. It was just a part of the ongoing experimentation process throughout this collage. Here I´m simply showing you the various layers in the order in which they appear in the finished layout so at this point it´s going to look strange and out of place. However, if you´ve got this far you may have the patience to stay with me a little while longer to see what effect this photo eventually has. After I changed the blending mode to Pin Light at 80% opacity this is what it looked like.

(Not impressive but I did warn you The surprising effect comes later.) Directly above that I placed the following FN background, Stonehenge which looks like this.

 

As you can see it has its own full moon which is why I placed the additional one from that old kit in the same position. Once I´d added that background paper I changed its blending mode to Overlay and the opacity to 50%.

Yes, I know that photo at the bottom still looks annoyingly out of place but I´m gradually, if infuriatingly slowly, coming to that. The next step was to add a photo of a Scottish cemetery which, luckily, included its own crow and, unfortunately, a huge ugly pylon.

 

After cropping this photo and using the clone tool to remove the pylon, I placed it on the layout using the Multiply blending mode.

Now at last you can see the effect of that annoying photo which now appears to reflect the light cast on the tombstone by the full moon. I suppose I could have left it at that but I can never leave well alone and, besides, I wanted to add one of my favourite images, the angel which appears in another Halloween layout.

 

Luckily, I´d saved the original extraction (always a good idea, especially for image hoarders like me) so I erased the tombstone, softened the outline a little and added her to the layout as a forlorn little ghost using the Exclusion blending mode at 30%.

 

At this point I added the crow on the left which I´d extracted from another photo. For him I used the Hard Mix blending mode at 80% opacity. Then I thought that another crow flying across the moon would be a good idea in order to lead the eye down to the main focus of the page, ie the tombstone and the ghost, so I dug around among my various bitmaps until I found the perfect crow silhouette and added it at 90% opacity with the Soft Light blending mode.

Again, I could have left this as it is but it was a Scottish cemetery after all so I really wanted to add a Celtic cross. Here´s the finished layout with the cross added using the Overlay blending mode. I didn´t even have to alter the opacity in order to allow the lightning to strike right through it.

 

If you´ve got this far I admire your patience and perseverance! On the other hand, I find that these characteristics are exactly what one needs in order to actively enjoy experimenting with these wonderful PS blending modes. I hope that any beginner reading this will be inspired to try them out. It´s a good way to spend a dreary overcast day. I´m off now to do the ironing, not the best way to spend any kind of day, dreary or otherwise. I´m so glad that I´ve got Stephen King´s Pet Sematary in my iPod to distract me from that tedious chore.

PS You know, after reading the book I´ve found it almost impossible to spell that word correctly without using the spell check....

All Souls´ Night

The origins of Halloween, also known as All Souls´Night, lie in the Celtic festival of Samhain, (a Gaelic word meaning summer´s end) which marked the end of summer and the harvest. Bonfires were lit, often to provide light for those bringing in livestock from the fields or mountains to be slaughtered for winter. On this day, the Celts believed that the door to the underworld was opened, letting in spirits. They would hold a feast, setting a place for any deceased relatives, as they were believed to visit home on this day. Malevolent spirits entered the earthly realm as well and people would dress in costume in order to confuse these spirits. This evolved into the custom of visiting houses to collect food for the feast while in costume, a precursor to trick-or-treating.

I don´t know exactly when Halloween became sanitized, commercialized and family friendly but a poem written by the American Edith Wharton in 1903 seems to indicate that it still retained its most sinister connotations around that time. Read the first verse and judge for yourself.

All Souls

by

Edith Wharton

A thin moon faints in the sky o’erhead,

And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead.

Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways,

Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays,

But forth of the gate and down the road,

Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode.

For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night,

When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

I wonder if she had something like this in mind.

By the way, if you´re a beginner and would like to know how relatively easy it was to create the above collage, watch this space and I´ll show you.... 

Advice From A Cow

I´ve been missing in action, or rather in inaction, since July when I was struck down and brought to a standstill, or rather a lie still, by a particularly vicious bout of sciatica. At first I resigned myself to lying around on the lawn alternating between reading and enjoying the garden but after a while reading began to pall, the garden and the house began to look neglected, the laundry remained unironed and I began to fret. It was around that time that I came upon this poem...

 

ODE TO A COW

When life seems one too many for

you,

Go and look at a cow.

When the future’s black and the

outlook blue,

Go and look at a cow.

For she does nothing but eat her

food,

And sleep in the meadows entirely

nood,

Refusing to fret or worry or

brood

Because she doesn’t know how.

Whenever you’re feeling bothered

and sore,

Go and look at a cow.

When everything else is a fearful

bore,

Go and look at a cow.

Observe her gentle and placid air,

Her nonchalance and savoir faire,

Her absolute freedom from every

care,

Her imperturbable brow.

So when you’re at the end of your

wits,

Go and look at a cow.

Or when your nerves are frayed

to bits,

And wrinkles furrow your brow;

She’ll merely moo in her gentle

way,

Switching her rudder as if to say:

“Bother tomorrow! Let’s live

today!

Take the advice of a cow.”

Not only did I find this advice a-moo-sing but I started thinking about it and realised that I was worrying needlessly and spoiling a lovely peaceful summer by feeling guilty about neglecting my chores. I don´t mean that I took the advice literally and just lay there chewing the cud and staring placidly into the distance but I finally started to enjoy my enforced inactivity rather than brooding on it. I´ve since had the first appointment with my osteopath and feel a little better already. I´ve even managed to sit rather than recline for long enough to swap my book for needle and thread.

So this page is my tribute to the wise old cow and also my thank you to Diane who gave me her permission to use a photo of her beautiful Lilly with her first calf, the equally beautiful Gabby. Hope she´ll forgive me for altering that perfect photo ever so slightly to give it a painted look to go with the background. 

Try to take that advice to heart. Enjoy what´s left of the summer and leave the chores for a rainy day.

Off To The Coast