have finally gotten back to my Digital Expressions (by Susan Tuttle) lessons.
lesson three pertains to incorporating text into a piece.

i've used two photos and several layers of text hoping to create a painterly botanical type of piece . . . i'm pleased with this and hope to do some more soon.
i'm starting to feel much more comfortable working in my PSE7 program however my pace

is still pretty slow and it takes me forever to create something that i'm satisfied with.

my original photo

this is my result from lesson #2 in Digital Expressions by Susan Tuttle.

the lesson was "Popping Areas of Color" and was really only difficult because my hands weren't really steady enough to manage the mouse/cursor to select areas. it's very easy to wobble a bit on one's intended line (especially if one has shaky hands at all) and even though i chose an extremely simple photo to work with i managed to botch it up.

there is a special tablet one can get and it enables the user to hold a pen-like instrument and actually "draw" on the image . . . i may have to do some research and see if it would be worth it for me to get one.

because my background was a white towel for this photo it didn't really make much of a difference when i removed the color. so i decided to additionally filter my background with a sketch layer and then got to wandering around a bit and kinda did my own thing . . .

i guess i did succeed in creating a color popped look but i didn't exactly follow all instructions to the letter.

i like the original photo much better but i did learn some things and am now ready to step away from my photoshop program and my computer screen for a while.

today i used a shot of Grace to do some PSE7 practice. i recently purchased a book (Digital Expressions by Susan Tuttle) that is all about "creating digital art with adobe photoshop elements". all of the digital art that i have so far done has been by trial and error and i thought i would see if progressing through this book would help me out. i'm hoping for less cursing and more happy endings!

anyway, she starts the reader out with simple vignetting instructions and i followed along with a shot of Gracie. i did learn some things and am ready to go on to the next challenge: Popping Areas of Color.

so here's to happy ending number one~!