We had an eventful trip overnight to Yosemite yesterday and here are a few photos. One of the things that was interesting was to harvest some wild elderberries. I have been looking for them because it’s been said that my little king bird likes them in their diet. I like elderberry jelly as well so here they were all ripe and ready for the eating! Or at least so I thought! A word of warning… cook the berries first and only have a few and DO NOT eat any of the stems. My mother and I both did and suffered from mild cyanide poisoning 🙁
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A little evening drama
It started out as a clear hot day today leading into a dramatic evening. Always awe inspiring when nature gets bored.
How to draw a cute ladybug in Photoshop
Step by step
When drawing from scratch I usually draw my little cartoons with a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop but I decided to not stick with what was familiar to me and try to do the whole drawing in just photoshop. I used mostly used shape layers tracing a drawing that I sketched out on paper. I will show you below the steps from inspiration to completion on how to create this bug on the right. Hopefully you can take these steps and create your own cute little creature using these techniques.
Lastly I decided this would be a cute little accent for my RSS feeds as my follow me bug. I used the custom speech bubble shape and smooshed it around with the direct selection tool. The font I used is an old one called giddyup std. I liked how it matched her little antenna!
A couple from fern spring
It was nice to go to Yosemite – a place I go to quite often and discover a little gem I haven’t seen before. It’s just a little spot along the side of the road called Fern Spring that runs all year round. Below are a couple shots taken with a tripod at ISO 100, F5.6 & .8 sec exposure to get the blurred water.
Sharing a garden special
Below is a nice little video from Burpee seeds on growing lettuce. They have a special of no shipping this weekend if you mention weeknfree on checkout of an order of $40 or more. They mention in this video that lettuce is a cool season crop so they would like you get started on your Fall planting. However I have been quite successful in growing it right during the hot part of august thanks to using something called salad tables and shade cloth. More about that below the video.
Below is a photo of my salad table growing a nice crop of loose oak leaf lettuce. Every week I have been able to clear cut myself a new batch of fresh organic lettuce! You can read about how to construct a salad table here. Basically the concept is drainage, drainage, drainage. It doesn’t require much soil and is at waist height so no bending over. I made mine not at the same dimensions as this link because I wanted it to fit nicely next to my clawfoot bathtub pond. This whole area is covered with white shade cloth that blocks about 25% of the hot August sun. This allows me to still grow lettuce even in the dead heat of the Summer without it bolting. I plan to replace a lot of my ornamental plants in here with loose leaf lettuce. Not only is it tasty to eat but it’s pretty to look at as well! What a great way to accomplish two objectives at once!
Gotta show off my water lily as well!
and my baby blue plumbago mixed with my bubble gum pink suptertunias!
Beginning Photoshop CS5 hands-on course in Antioch
I will be teaching 6 hours of hands-on training in Adobe Photoshop CS5 at the Antioch Recreation Department. You’ll start with a basic introduction of the interface to feeling comfortable with many of the tools. You’ll fix photos and create your own artwork from scratch.
Finnessing the King
Below is the king of my poodle pack (at least in body weight) and following that is how I made a little more kingly…
Original
I am lucky to have a great little poodle who will gladly do anything I ask him to do as long as he can have jerky treat at the end. For this photo I draped an old cape from a Halloween costume I once wore. I picked up a little crown from the .99 cent store. I frizzed up his hair a little so it would hold it and set up a couple strobes. I shot with the light box to the right and a reflected umbrella to the left a little higher. The shot wasn’t perfect and needed a little help so I did a little photoshop as you will see the original below:
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I used “content aware” to take out the edge of the black curtain in the background.
I used the patch tool to fix his hair.
I added sparkle to his crown using the star brush tool with white as the foreground color
I used the clone rubber stamp tool and sampled light hair with opacity of 50% and set the blend mode to lighten to clean the eye stain under his eyes
Lastly I used the glamor glow from Nik Efex to give a softness and I masked his face so that it didn’t apply to his eyes and nose.
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