Playing with Textures

Whew!

Can you feel the stress floating away?  The kids are officially back in school and for the first time in 11 years I have two FULL DAYS a week in which I have the house completely to myself!!!!!!  Oh the plans I have for my free time!

Once the kids started back to school, I jumped right into Operation Clean-Up.  You know, undoing all the stuff a busy summer at home with kids, countless camping trips and general laziness on my part - - it all adds up to a dirty, cluttered, unorangaized mess.   Decluttering, purging closets, sorting through piles I've stashed and deep cleaning the entire house has taken the better part of a week.  I still have the laundry room and master closet to finish.  But that can wait.  I'm itching to get back to blogging.

It seems like forever since I've had the opportunity catch up with all of you and I'm looking forward to it.  I hope you can all forget my sporadic blogging.   I promise, I'm back for real this time and am looking forward to showing off a few projects I've done over the summer and checking in on all of you.

Today I'd like to share a few photos I've been playing with on Picnik.  I use it to tweak all of my photos since I use a very old point and click type camera.  Your all probably familiar with this site, but if not, it's great for people like me who are Photo Shop challenged.  Normally I'll crop, brighten, and boost the color a little.  But then I discovered textures.  It is only available with the Premium package which is a bumber, but if your already a member go check it out.

I wish each texture had a name so I could tell you exactly which one I used - sorry about that.  But basically I opened a photo, clicked on the Texture tab, and then selected a texture.  If I like the selection I then played with it a little by adjusting either the mode in the drop down box, or the intensity using the slider.

The first photo below is a favorite from this past spring.

Before:

 After adding a texture and fading it out I like the photo even more.  The texture gave the photo an almost hand painted effect.

The next photo I played with is also a favorite - ok they are all favorites.  Here's the before - perfectly acceptable and pretty.

But after adding a cracked and flaking texture it's even better.  Now that I'm looking at it, maybe I should have changed it to black and white first - but then I love those green Zinnia's, not sure if I'm willing to give it up!

And finally, the last photo originally looked like this.

 First I added an texture with curled edges and then on top of that I applied an texture with script.

How easy is that!  I love the pop textures can add to photos.  I'm sure in the future I'll be using it all the time.

Hope you all are having a lovely week and I'll talk with you again soon,

Robin