Drama, Texture, and Smoking Brides

Kim Klassen is amazing with textures. I stumbled onto her page by accident through reading something else, and I was hooked.

Enough that I stayed up till 4am for two days messing around with textures and photographs. This of course is intentional sleep deprivation but I'm not blaming anything except my magpie attention span for it.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

This post of Kim's caught my eye, especially Day 1 - Adding Drama. So I dug out some photographs I took when I was travelling in Austria for the World Choir Games this year, and had a go at it.

Which (after some instruction tweaking as I'm using Photoshop CS2 rather than CS4) resulted in this:



I nicknamed this lady the Smoking Bride for obvious reasons. She seemed to be somewhat annoyed as well, apparently waiting for her wedding car driver, and she did tend to speak rather loudly (though whether that's just a language thing or actual annoyance, I couldn't tell. I went by the cranky expression.)


And because I couldn't leave well enough alone, I tweaked the photo with one of Kim's textures, added in some gorgeous brushes from Annika Von Holdt, and voila - vintage ephemera ahoy:



After years and years of resistance, finally I seem to have caught the Photoshop bug. I don't know whether it's good or bad - the last thing I need is a new distraction, with production, graduation, and exams coming up...

Ah, heck with it. I'm filing it under Rest and Relaxation.

And yes, THAT'S my story and I'm STILL sticking to it.

Inspiration Room Challenge: Rococo Nouveau

So. There was this challenge photograph posted one balmy day by the brilliant Deryn Mentock. (All right, it was mostly hot and muggy here, but I'm taking artistic license here. Liberally.)

With the photograph was an immensely eye-opening and wonderful link on how to make a colour palette. Don't go there if you don't have time to spare. It's addictive, this colour palette business. I was supposed to just mosey over and look, but I wound up spending the rest of the hour working on the colour palette because it was so fascinating.

Which resulted in this:


...and, after some precious lessons on why it is not a good idea to start working on challenge pieces after midnight on a long day (crooked wire, bad wraps, even more crooked wraps which now litter half the finished work), THIS is the result:



And now onto better photographs when I'm -not- trying to wear a piece and take a picture. Details on colour scheme and various bits of the piece:


The pendant is half an earring that I bought and never used, so I recycled it.







Clasp detail at the back, the best I could do because I was lying on the floor at a really funny angle trying to take this!


The clasp proper. Ignore the crooked wrapped link, move along, nothing to see...

Originally I thought it looked Gothic. Then after I finished the piece, I realised it wasn't Gothic, nor Classical Gothic, it was Rococo. So Rococo Nouveau it is!

And now off to post the link because for once, I actually finished a challenge ON TIME. Amazing. I hope the new owner likes it as much as I do!