Fun with Winnings

A short time ago I was fortunate enough to win the "name the bot" challenge at Inke's site and this is a picture from her site showing the loot. It arrived in the mail yesterday and looked even better in person. By the way, if by some far out chance you don't know Inke at Altered Artifacts, you are missing out on a very talented person and a funny, good read to boot.  And you must check out the bot her husband made. I want one! I thought, maybe by being the winner of the naming contest, I'd get him, but, alas I got a packet brimming with wonderful loot. Not a bad second choice at all.

I decided to load and browse the Dover CD "Floral Embroidery Designs" and do a bit of playing. I first chose a round floral that I thought would make a good mask, but I had forgotten that only the edges of the file are pixels and you cannot just choose the inside (for the inside part of a leaf) to color in.


Here is the file I chose to work with:

First I tried merging these two layers so that I would have areas to select, but the pattern does not have well defined areas and an intended small selection was selecting the entire purple section. Merge unhelpful. Undo. So instead I carefully colored with a brush in color mode until I got a look I liked and then put a copy of the ring in dark green on top to bring back the lovely outlines.

Then to try this out, I put it over a picture of a lovely sunset that I took from my back deck years ago, which by the way was a finalist in a national photography contest. What did I win, you ask? Well, actually I only got an official certificate stating the fact that this picture was a finalist in the contest. But, still it was a nice notice.

To get the final image, I used the marquee tool with the shift key held to constrain to a circle and using the shift bar to help me move it into place, to select the inner circle of the ring. Then being careful to be on the photo layer I selected the inverse (that selected the portions outside of the ring) and filled it with black.

What do you think?

I can't wait to play with these some more. These decorative patterns would make lovely brushes.....

xoxo