Gerry Landreth

We don't get much snow in Alabama, which is always later in the season, usually in January. I mentioned to a cousin in Duluth, Minnesota, that her pictures of snow a couple of years ago were beautiful, which set her off on a detailed discussion of the trials and tribulations of dealing with "wet" snow. I learned snow is most beautiful in pictures but not in your driveway.

Most of the gradients I use are preset and I will tweak them depending on the project. Susan has a good outline of that process in a later post.

I will finish the rest over the next couple of weeks. This gave me a chance to practice techniques I hadn't used in a while. The pictures are stock images from the Morgue File, and the font is Samantha Upright.

I am preparing for a procedure, so I will be checking in and saving the work for later. It will give me something to do while recuperating. Plus, I get to peek at other posts for inspiration!

It was another hot and humid weekend here. The AC went out, making it a bit more uncomfortable than usual. Having lived through long hurricane-related power outages in Miami, I learned to cope. The upside is that I had power and lots of fans. Fortunately, it was a faulty capacitor that was under warranty. When the repair guy explained what a capacitor does, I resisted telling him I knew what it did. After all, I've seen Back to the Future 1, 2, AND 3!

@Cassel That composite was in a long-overlooked folder. I initially created it to help my mom, who was in early dementia, visualize the trees before they were planted. I never added shadows to it, so this was a good opportunity to experiment. It also gave me a chance to practice sky replacement. Thanks for another great workshop. I always learn something new.

Day 7. Shadowing the pin was quite a challenge. When I got to the second project, I better understood the process. The second picture is our front yard. I was trying to visualize planting a couple of trees. The trees are lifted from a website. The picture was taken on a dreary day, so I replaced the sky to make it more believable.

I searched for "layered clusters," which narrowed the results. The file types available for download are JPG, TIFF, or PSD.

Day 6. I found interesting layered clusters at Digital Scrapbook. I deleted the shadow layers and started from scratch.

Day 5. After reading the comments from others about this assignment, I'm in good company. The first two were done entirely with the warp brush. The third one required a hand-drawn shadow. I was using a mouse, but I suspect it will be easier with a tablet. I'll go back and see if that works better.

Day 4. I'm improving at visualizing what I want but slightly less at making it happen. Carole: regarding the feathering in yesterday's exercise, I may or may not have done that. I redid it many times and got turned around on several of them. At least, if I didn't, I felt better that I was in such good company.

Day 3 I have always been fascinated by lifted shadows. More practice is needed. When I first tried to pull one, it went everywhere. After several more attempts, I realized the brush was set to NOISE. Oops!

Day 2. The picture is of one of my great nephews, Felix, who was a Ninja Turtle last year for Halloween. Carole: When you reminded me that chalk doesn't need a shadow, I thought, "Yep. Overthinking again."

Shadows Day 1 - I tend to overthink, well, pretty much everything. I'm looking forward to working solely on shadows this week.

My mother canned every summer for decades. My sister and I were scarce when it came time to shell peas. Recently, one of my nieces talked about how she hated to shell peas and her sisters chimed in with the same sentiment.