Playing with Paper and Photoshop

Let me begin this post by confessing that I have a paper fetish. If it is made of paper, I love it. Calendars, magazines, artwork, books, cards, photographs, stamps, postcards, ticket stubs, and Chinese fortunes.

With that said, I went to my favorite scrapbook store on my lunch hour today. I haven't been there in over 2 months because I can't just go in and look....I HAVE to buy. The store was filled with beautiful patterned paper. And I bought.

Tonight I scanned a few pieces of paper into my computer along with three pen, ink and colored pencil calendar cards that I drew recently. I began to manipulate the images digitally to produce the following pictures. Some are more successful than others, but the outcome is all part of the process of trial and error

This is where I began. Photoshop allows you to work in layers. Each action can be applied in it's own layer and discarded if it doesn't work. There is so much this program can do. I am familiar with only a tiny fraction of it's capabilities.

This is the same image with the colors inverted. I especially like the colors on the chair in this one. Funny how different the colors and patterns are when you see their opposites (on the color wheel).

Here is one with the 3 different cards altered slightly and then a colored pencil filter was used.


In this next one I began to get excited by the alterations. I like the way the whole image is softened and begins to read as a whole instead of it's individual parts.

This is just taking the last image a step further by removing most of the color.

Along the way, I also began to cut out smaller slices of the picture to form new images.




My favorite pictures are these.




I like the relative simplicity of the last three images. I may go back later and add some text to each. Maybe a favorite quotation or word.....