Thursday, May 7, 2015

A New Look for the Blog

I wanted a new, lighter, look to my blog but I still wanted to stay true to the theme: Awash with Color. Originally I chose a photo I shot of a cathedral in Germany. The stained glass windows provided the perfect wash of color across the columns and walls.

Former Background Photo
This time I wanted to use a floral background, partly because I'm on the Susan Tierney Cockburn design team (Susan designs a lot of flower dies for creating realistic looking flowers), and partly because flowers are a sign of spring: regrowth and renewal. Although my favorite season is actually fall (love the colors, plus a huge fan of Halloween), I really (really!) dislike winter - so spring is something I look forward to pretty much from the end of fall until the weather warms again and the flowers start to bloom.

I knew I had a lot of garden photos from visiting the Powerscourt Estate in Ireland a few years ago; I went through and found the one below to use as a model. I could have used the photo as is but decided to do a literal wash of color, with watercolor paint.


Keeping in mind that the painting was going to be cropped plus have the edges whitened to blend with backgrounds here and in my social media sites, I created the following watercolor.


As usual, I had to play around with sizing, placement of my copyright, and how much fading to do on the edges (sometimes different across sites). Here is one image showing a fade to white on the edges:


For the blog, I ended up using a fade at both the right side and the bottom to get it to look the best on different monitors/platforms. I changed the colors on the blog to match the colors in the watercolor. I hope you like the changes!

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