Whizzo Artplay Palette **coming soon**
Whizzo WordART **coming soon**
ThinStrip Layer Masks No. 1 https://www.oscraps.com/shop/ThinStrips-Masks-No.-1.html

Notes in Photoshop Elements 14

This layout began on my couch, on a Friday evening, with a glass of wine, a poem, and the magnificent view through my patio doors.

This is my text:

Sometimes it is really important to celebrate nothing or maybe what there is to celebrate is really everything. The flowers from my garden in the vase on the kitchen table, the tomatoes on the counter in the yellow farm bowl waiting to turn into sauce, a restorative yoga class and then lunch and laughter with friends, a slow news day with all who I love (here, there, and everywhere), still safe and anchored by gravity, a Cave Glow candle in cedarwood and vanilla ignited to welcome in the weekend with light and fragrance, and then there is the settling onto the couch with an oaky glass of chardonnay, (or possibly two), to gaze into the treetops and sky. It is Friday. Pizza will be arriving soon. And the breeze through the wide-flung patio door--so fresh! The newly fledged bluejays in the birdbath--so awkward! My thin-stemmed wineglass--so fragile...but arent we all? Really? But not in this minute, not right now, there is no fragility just as there is no strength, not while the light glistens on the leaves of the plants in my meadowscape, not while the hummingbird dances in the lavender, not while the quiet softly settles into me and I, somewhat to my surprise, become the quiet. There is just now.

I wrote the poem on the canvas, then created the background, which involved a layering of four papers from the Artplay Palette, on different blending modes, to develop the mood I was aiming for. From there I dragged in the photo of my wine glass (color dodge blending mode, with layer-mask blending), and let the rest of the layout evolve organically.

The Thin Layer Masks added depth (I clipped papers from the Artplay Palette to them) and I also added a bunch of transfers from the APP as well as the dotted overlay (at reduced opacity). Once all that was done, I added the embellishments and the word art, rotated so that it would read vertically.