I'm embarking on two new travel albums and this is a page from the first one—our Adirondack Mountains trip in September—that deals with my evolving relationship with taxidermy. I selected Artsy Paper #2 as a good fit for my blending goals—later on I would lighten the background by duplicating the paper on overlay blend mode at lower opacity. My objective in blending was to highlight the taxidermy while also dialing down the background noise—I was going after more of a suggestion of the crafts on display than a “bam!” Therefore, much of my blending, using an artsy Blending Brush, happened at reduced opacity. The hard right edge of the tree in my original photo was not a good candidate for blending so I was stumped for a while, as my usual tricks of abutting the edge with a frame or Straightline Threadz did not work for me in this case. My solution was to extend the background by adding more tree trunk. To do this, I added Transfer 2 to the right of the photo, duplicated the photo, flipped the photo horizontally (voila, tree trunk!), blended to shape with my trusty blending brush, and texturized the new trunk with transfers from the mini-palette. I finished up with a few elements.