Peony Digital Sketch 2012

I was out in my yard snapping some photos of the peonies, which are in full bloom. They are one of my absolute favorite flowers and I seem to photograph each year's blooms. This evening I took one of my photos and created this Peony Digital Sketch for My Digital Sketchbook.

Believe it or not, this was a photograph of a white peony when I started. I wasn't in love with the original photo, but I am indeed in love with the digital sketch I created from it. Yay for peonies!

I Got Sunshine

I've created another piece for My Digital Sketchbook, and this one is based on photos I took of my grandson's sunflowers a couple of years ago. I love playing around with photos and turning them into something different.

Something about sunflowers just says Sunshine! I love them.

Flower Fairy Digital Sketch

This is one of two digital sketches I'm adding to my digital sketchbook today. I'm calling it the Flower Fairy.

This began as a digital photo I took last summer. I have a window box outside one of my studio windows and I had planted some Vinca there that was in full bloom. I also always have a little resin fairy perched on the ledge of the box. Not sure if she's sulking or daydreaming, but she's cute either way.

I played around with several filters in PhotoScape before finally giving it the sketch-like effect. I really love how the purplish hue in the background contrasts against the white tones of the fairy. And I also like the many flower petals and leaves help to create texture in the background.

I'm also linking this to the Collage Obsession "Many" Challenge this week.

Peony Love

I had so much fun creating my Sunflower Landing digital image the other day that I decided not only to make more...but also to create a brand new category for these, which I'm calling My Digital Sketchbook.  I'll include images here that I want to appear as if they came right out of a real (rather than digital) sketchbook. For the most part I will use my own digital photographs to make these digital sketches.

So my next digital sketch I've created is called Peony Love. I'm also using this for the City Crafter Challenge Blogs' Love Challenge.  We needed to use the word Love or a symbol of love in our creation. This started off as one of my Peony Photographs.

Once again I used PhotoScape to digitally alter this flower image. I love flowers, so they are always a favorite theme in my photographs. And flowers always make me think of love too...since flowers are very often given as a token or gesture of someone's love. Call me sappy, but I love those kinds of gestures!

Sunflower Landing

This is a digital image creation that I made from one of my own sunflower photos, Dylan's Sunflower, that I took last summer. I'm calling it Sunflower Landing. I've created it for the 3 Muses Black & White Challenge.  We had to use the Black & White theme, but that was really our only limitation, and how we interpret that theme is up to each artist. Any medium can be used for the 3 Muses challenges too, which gives us a lot of wonderful creative freedom. And in this case, it gave me an excuse to play around with digitally editing and altering my own photos, which I really enjoy.

I wanted to create an image that would appear as if it came right out of my sketchbook. So I took my sunflower photo and first changed it from color to black and white. Then I gave it a bit of extra contrast. And then I gave it a watercolor pencil effect that has no color. Next I wanted just a little pop of color, so I added the colorful butterfly to the sunflower's leaf. And finally, I added a frame to the photo that makes it look as if I've torn it out of my sketchbook.

I used PhotoScape to edit this photo. Normally I would use PaintShopPro, but I only have that program on my laptop, and I keep PhotoScape on my desktop PC for when I want to edit photos from there.

I really love how this turned out, and it makes me want to do more with digital editing of my own photographs. It also makes me want Spring to hurry up and get here, especially after the 10-12 inches of snow we got yesterday!