Moorland Release **on sale, coming tomorrow**
including Artsy Template #246 and Moorland Artplay Palette
Journaling: Long before the Women's Marches in January 2017, protests were breaking out everywhere, including in California, where I was visiting for my birthday. The entire perimeter of Lake Merritt in Oakland was ringed with protestors raising their voices against the hateful, bullying language and discriminatory campaign promises of newly elected President Donald J. Trump. Like many others in their neighborhood, Eva and Christina, with Emma's help, made a sign to hang from their balcony. Their message to all those who feared the loss of their civil liberties was "you are not alone." 11-13-2016
Notes in Photoshop Elements 14
This is a page for my daughters' albums and the work was about documentation in an artsy way rather than about artfulness itself. I had a lot of stuff that I wanted to fit on this page to tell the story, so I used the template as a map, to direct the placement of various things. I left the frames in place, but turned off all the other layers so I'd have a clean-ish slate, then added a background paper and blended the large photo into the bottom area, which the template had as white space. Since I have zero patience for extractions, the photo is blended in with layer masks and a brush. I chose Artsy Paper #5 because it looked like it would offer both color and open space for my title and journaling.
Sometimes putting together a page is like dealing with a series of falling dominoes, and that is what happened here. Everything I changed caused me to have to change something else. To fit the title, which I wanted big, and the journaling, I had to shift the frames and change their orientation. Eventually I wound up with a a line of photos marching across the page, which, thematically, was fine, being that this page is about protest.
Once the story was told, I clicked all the turned-off layers back on, one at a time. I wound up using most of those layers, just moving/resizing them into new positions and recoloring the stains. It saved me a ton of time because the thinking was done for me and I didn't have to place transfers and overlays individually to develop interest.
To finish up, I added the flower embellishments, word label, buttons, charm, and black rectangular shapes at the top, to balance out all the black on the sign at the bottom of the layout.
