Friday Finds Finally

After one of my usual loooong blogging breaks, I just had to share today on Kim Klassen's Friday Finds.  I feel like I hit the jackpot! I have been looking for and creating backgrounds for my still life shots for Kim's Be Still 52 class. I've painted a watercolor background as well as a white tray to use as a backdrop. You can read my post about that over at my collaborative blog Focusing on Life. But I have been searching for some old wood or an old fence and have been unsuccessful so far.

However, in the Be Still Lounge I came across a post about creating a distressed wood background. You can read it here if you're interested. I purchased all the supplies (for a total of less than $40) and spent the morning painting. I won't go into the details of how I created this because I followed the exact instructions on the website, but I do have to say that it was easy, peasy!  One side are these beautiful aqua tones and the other side is a distressed white. You will be seeing a lot of these backgrounds in my photos in the future!

Then yesterday I went to the salvage shop called Sweet Salvage to see if I could find any interesting props. They are only open one weekend a month (Th-Sun) and it's a good thing or I would go broke! Always fun things to find there.  I found this little bowl that so reminded me of Kim that I just had to have it. Little did I know when I bought it that it was going to go so perfectly with my new aqua board background and these apricots that I grabbed at the market yesterday. Kismet, I tell you!

So those are my finds for this week. If you haven't checked out Kim's Friday Finds, do yourself a favor and  head  over there. Lots of fun and inspiration to be found!

App Happy Wednesday Week 11

Playing along with Barb Brookbank and her App Happy Wednesday today.  If you haven't visited, it's a great resource for finding new apps to play with.

I recently discovered this fabulous iPhone photography tutorial on a blog called The Art of Digital Photo Painting and couldn’t wait to give it a try.  Many of the apps used were ones I already had but hadn’t been using, mostly because I hadn’t taken the time to learn how to use them correctly.  But this looked like a lot of fun, so I decided to give it a try.

Since she used a photo taken in Venice, Italy, I decided the best way to follow along and know that I was doing it right was to use a similar photo. I pulled out an old (2003) photo taken with my big camera on a trip to Italy and decided to use that. Although the photo wasn’t taken with my phone, all the editing was done on my iPad.

Here is the original photo:

I followed the tutorial exactly, step by step, and I do admit that it took a while to edit this shot because I was feeling my way with each app but I learned a lot of what each app is capable of doing along the way and I know that I will be using them again.

The only thing I did beyond the tutorial was to take my image into Squareready to add the drop shadow, making it look like a painting hanging on the wall.

Here is the final edited version:

 

The second time I went through the tutorial, things came a bit easier and I’m sure before long I’ll be using all of these apps and doing the edits much quicker, so if you try this, don’t get discouraged. It is well worth the effort. Obviously you don't have to use a photo taken in Venice! I'm looking forward to trying this with a lot of different styles of photos. Be sure to let me know if you try it and share your results. I’d love to see them!

 

App Happy and Word Art Happy

My friend Barb Brookbank at Keeping with the Times is doing a series on her blog called App Happy Wednesday where you link up your edited phone images with the app of your choice. Well, being a pretty app happy girl myself, I was happy to take part! The above image was edited with the Waterlogue app and I have to say that using this app makes me feel like an artist!  So easy and so rewarding!  However, I have found that on some images too much detail is lost in the waterlogue process and so to recapture some of that detail I take the original image and the waterlogued image into Blender and bring back just enough of the original until I'm happy.  This process has made me love Waterlogue even more!

Then a note about the word art (which is from Ali Edwards).  I am a word art fanatic and love to use it on my photos.  Yesterday I read about how you can take your word art that you currently have on your computer and make it available to you on your mobile devices! I didn't waste a minute until I checked this out! Here's how it's done:

1. First of all, head to the App Store and purchase the LetterGlow app. I think I remember that it's $1.99 but trust me, you won't be disappointed!

2. Make sure you have Dropbox installed on your computer. If you don't, go to dropbox.com and install it. It's free.  When you open Dropbox on your computer, you will see a new folder called Apps. Copy the word art files you want to use into that folder.

3. Make sure you have installed the Dropbox app on your phone or tablet.

4. Open LetterGlow on your phone or tablet and click on the gear icon at the bottom (gray circle). Then click on Install Overlays and then Add Overlay and then Dropbox. This will take you to your Dropbox folder on your computer where you will click on the Apps folder where you have stored your word art. This will bring that word art into a folder called My Set in LetterGlow.  Once a particular word art image is in your set, you won't  have to go back to Dropbox to retrieve it.

5. Back up in LetterGlow until you get back to the main screen. Choose your photo and click "Use".

6. At the bottom, click on the box with the dotted line around it and then click on the plus sign that appears above it.


7. Click on My Set which will take you to the word art that you have saved in LetterGlow. Tap the word art you want to use and it will place it over your photo.

8. From there you can resize and recolor your word art as desired. When you are happy with the result, click on the tiny triangle in the white bar at the bottom of the screen and click on Done. The next screen will give you the option of saving it to your Camera Roll or importing it into Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, etc.

I hope all this makes sense. I had to play a bit and have added more to the instructions I found to help make it more understandable.  So if you're a word art "junkie" like I am, give this a try. Let me know if you have any problems or questions. I'll be glad to see if I can help.