my playground

i find playing in my paintbox to be an extremely enjoyable and relaxing experience.

here you will find an eclectic mix of my *just for fun* experiments, doodles and other things that do not fit a specific category.

click thumbnails for larger views. as some of these images are quite large, thanks in advance for your patience while they load.

this is a variation of a submission for another challenge at retouchpro.com.

the premise: take some or all of the sunflowers in a photo of a field full of them and create a van gogh like painting. my submission to the challenge forum had the colors more muted as i felt that was more in keeping with van gogh's color palettes, but i really liked the bright yellow flowers best.

our christmas card for 2001 which contains an image combining a color photo of tony and a b&w of me into one image to show that we have been soulmates all along. *grin*

there is also a silly little flash christmas cartoon included.

response to a challenge to create an image having to do with green.

painting was created from a photo of prince edward island, canada (extremely green in summer and home of anne of green gables). cottage superemposed from another prince edward photo and girl with green tinted eyes comes from a circa 1915 photo.

here two damaged photos that appear to be from the early 1900's were cleaned and then combined into an illustration like image. (this was also used as a new years 2002 card with a theme of looking forward and looking back.)

example of pulling information from this almost totally black tintype with the use of layers and blend modes. only a slight amount of cloning and cleaning was applied so that information would remain very close to original.

(original untouched photo shown in thumbnail at left)