Summer sky (and a giveaway elsewhere)

This is another of the surprises that awaited me on the camera card the other day. My husband must have taken the shot on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. But it wasn’t until today that I began feeling a creative urge to do something with this big blue sky.

Besides, a blogging friend had just sent me a group of textures she had created, and I was keen on using one or more of them right away.

For this shot, after I adjusted the original to my liking, I added the new texture (below) that I just received from Dlyn. It’s called Rusty Paint. I used the hard blend mode, opacity 36%. I wanted something else around the perimeter, so I used this overlay from Florabella called Tea-Stained. I set the blending mode to soft and the opacity to 47%.

And because I wanted something completely different, I decided to run Pioneer Woman’s seventies action on the photo before I used the very same textures. I used the same blending modes but for the overlay, I set the opacity to 79%.

Sometimes I just like the original photograph. But I wasn’t in the mood for that today. I was looking for something else and I feel that I found it.

Original, Dlyn’s Rusty Paint texture, Florabella Tea-Stained overlay.

Please don’t get the impression that I know what I’m doing here. Maybe my hand was too heavy, I don’t know. How and why I choose what I do is a mystery even to me. There are too many choices but basically I just start fooling around. And then things begin to develop. A good rule of thumb for me is to walk away and come back later. Sometimes I ask myself what in the world I was thinking!

As an aside, things are just a little better today and that’s all I have to say about that. Thanks to everyone for your well wishes.

Go to Jenni’s blog before Monday to register to win a CD from someone you may already know. Well, somebody you would know from the blogging world, I mean. Readers who are familiar with Pioneer Woman may already know who Rechelle Malin is. She’s the Country Doctor’s Wife and until this morning, I had no idea that not only could she sing and play guitar but that she has a CD out (and you could win a free copy).

And she’s pretty darn good!

Happy Independence Day everyone! And until tomorrow, my friends . . .