Connie's Ramblings

Running a bit late this week with Easter and I was setting up the new laptop… it is for travel not a desktop replacement so I went for small and light and chose the Dell XPS M1330… so far I like it… especially since the clean install on it to get rid of the ‘extras’… Now that I have Vista SP1 on it things are doing quite well for the most part other than for some reason ZoneAlarm will not register any clicks made by the Wacom tablet… quite odd. Not sure if it is ZoneAlarm, Wacom or Vista’s Tablet drivers… UPDATE: I did a clean reinstall of ZoneAlarm and everything seems to be working properly now…

Anyway… Here is this weeks starter image for the NAPP Battle…

Just did this up quickly this morning… Bunny and bunny/chick parts from stockxchange

Another week, another NAPP Battle! (each week on NAPP an image is selected from stock.xchng and members create something with it) Here is this weeks starter image.

At first look I really had no idea what to do with this image… looks like someone threw a bunch of water on the girls face and her expression is kind of depressing… several members on the board turned it into abuse public awareness images… I wanted to go for something a bit happier…

This is what came out of playing around with it. Umm.. yep more butterfles.. I really didn’t like her mouth so it worked… Also reminds me I still need to finish my drawing too… Incidently, the Blue Morpho Butterfly photograph is mine, it was taken at the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls.

Here’s another version
giving her skin a bit of color and adding makeup…

* Note clicking on any of the images above will give you larger versions….

Battle Image for 106… As mentioned last week, each week on NAPP an image is selected from stock.xchng and members create something with it… Here is this weeks starter image…

Here is what I’ve done with mine… I pulled the butterflies from my Photoshop drawing project…

The frog is made entirely from Warped/Liquified/Dodged/Burned pieces of the branch… eye was hand drawn…

Rock was made using pattern stamp tool… (tribute to NAPP member Swampy… who used it in last weeks battle)

Click for Larger Image

Here is a preliminary with the leaves warped but no use of the liquify tool or dodging or burning…

It has been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here… I’ve been trying to keep up with the photo a day and with everything else going on which in January and February means wrestling tournaments… The past two weeks I was forced to change pace. I managed to catch the flu which my son brought home from school and then about a week later ended up with pneumonia which I’m still recovering from. Today was the first day I’ve manged to do much and I decided to sit down and play a bit in photoshop. I haven’t done a NAPP battle in a while so I did the 105th battle. NAPP is the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and each week an image is posted and people “photoshop” it to create an image.

Here is this weeks starting image

And below is what I did with it…

It was fun to play around a bit…

Went back and fixed a couple things like the shadow for the paint brush I had forgotten to add and I didn’t like the texture of the yellow paint above so here is an updated image.