Photo Art Friday – favourite book

Photo Art Friday’s challenge for 4 May 2012 was to link a piece of photo art to the title from one of your favorite books?!! What was he/she thinking????!!! This was a real challenge!

I rarely read a book twice. Not because I don’t want to but because there are so many good books waiting to be read so it’s difficult for me to choose an all time favourite book. However, Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the earth” stands out as one of the best I’ve read. Not only was it a good story but it contained a wealth of historical information and brought the middle ages alive so vividly. For those who don’t know the story it’s about a stonemason who dreams of building a cathedral – an idea that was widely believed to be impossible.

The 2 photos above are of Notre Dame des champs (our lady of the fields), a gothic style church (elevated to the status of basilica in 1993) in the French village of Avioth, which lies close to the Belgian border. Not far from here is the beautiful cistercian abbey of Orval.

Avioth is only a tiny village yet this huge church – seemingly as big as a cathedral – dominates the area and it is hard to imagine why a church of this size was built. It was apparently constructed in the XIV century where a miraculous statue of the virgin had been discovered and replaced an earlier oratory of more modest stature. It is still a place of pilgrimage.

TT 13 March 2012 free and easy

Kim Klassen’s challenge this week was to use any one of her textures in our composition.

I have used Kim’s zuzu texture blended in linear burn mode at 84% opacity.

TT happy heart

Kim Klassen’s challenge this week (6.03.2012) was to incorporate her texture called “happy heart” into a photo. I’ve also used her “stained music” texture

The quote reads: A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words – Unknown

I found the leaf heart on the beach on St Valentine’s day

TT-3 Jan 2012

Kim’s challenge, the first of the new year, is to use any one of her textures in our composition. I have used her latest texture “embrace” in this photo of garlands of flowers at a temple in Cambodia. I blended it using linear burn at 100% opacity.

This is what the flowers look like. They drop off the tree in the early morning.

12 days of texture – day 5

Today’s offering from Kim Klassen was Zuzu. I have used it here with the soft light blending mode at 100%.

golden angel

A friend of mine took this photograph of the beautiful golden angel in St Bartholomew’s church in Southwold, UK. She graciously gave me a copy to texturise and this is the result, just in time for Christmas.

and I used the image to make a virtual Christmas card (template kindly shared by Pixel Dust Photo Art)

12 days of texture-day 1

Kim Klassen is generously sharing 12 days of textures with us. This is the first one, called Lilly.

For this composition I set the background copy at soft light then added Lilly with the darken blending mode then Kim’s Cinammon with pin light blending mode and 69% opacity.

PAF-Christmas 2011

For many years my work took me regularly to Strasbourg (France). The city went all out in preparing for Christmas with many businesses making a special effort to decorate their premises. Part of my Christmas preparation was to walk through the streets marvelling at people’s inventiveness. This is one such scene.

I’ve processed this photo using PDPA’s French script on parchment at 100% opacity.

Texture Tuesday number 2

Kim’s prompt for Tuesday 8th November was to use at least one of her textures and to create a piece based on the number 2, this could be interpreted in any way we liked.  This is my twist on the number two,  of my last cat, Sandy, reflected in the mirror so that there are two of him.

I have used pumpkin grunge and simple things textures

this is the original photo

I’ve always been a cat person and we have never been long without a cat. After Truffle died we thought long and hard about getting another cat as we had suffered many casualties on the road in front of our house. As we drove back from France we decided to call in at the local animal refuge to see if they had any cats that needed new homes. We were firm believers that a cat should choose you, not the other way around but on this occasion no cat came forward. There was a huge ginger cat that I liked the look of but he showed no interest when we approached him. As we were about to leave the people running the refuge told us they had a couple of new arrivals that hadn’t been put in with the rest of the cats yet. We took one look at the ginger cat and said we would take him. We hadn’t intended getting 2 but when we looked at his companion, an adorable calico cat, we knew we had to take her too. The refuge had named him Lorenzo which we didn’t like and I can’t remember now what her name was but we renamed her Pebbles. The vet later told us that she was older than he was and we have always wondered if she was his mother.

This is the two of them in a rare moment of togetherness.

Pebbles loved flowers and this is my favourite picture of her

Sadly we lost them both to illness and unfortunately our domestic circumstances – we travel a lot – mean that we cannot have a cat for the moment so we feed one of the local street cats instead and have had her neutered so that she won’t turn up on the doorstep with a litter of kittens that need homes finding for them. Here she is, looking pretty disgruntled at being interrrupted while breakfasting to have her photo taken.

why not pop over to the cafe to see what other people have done on this theme?

Texture Tuesday times 2

The challenge for Texture Tuesday 25 October was to use any image we liked and to incorporate two of Kim’s textures. Here are two versions of my final photo, one with text and one without.

I used two of my photos superimposed on each other and added Kim’s pumpkin grunge and simple things textures.