Daily Art Post July 18, 2011

Summertime! banner created with InDesign and Photoshop CS4

      Today I played with a photograph I took of some of my Dianthus flowers last summer. I wanted to make a banner in Adobe InDesign, so I started with the flowers, since I wanted to create letters with the Dianthus image as the "color" of the text. I am posting the process in backward order just to be difficult.

The InDesign piece before I imported it to Photoshop

     The very top banner is the finished banner, cropped in Photoshop and with two borders added, also in Photoshop.

Filters: Paint Daub, Posterize, Cutout

 
   
     The second image is the "Summertime!" lettering
and background created in InDesign. I converted the type to outlines so I could put the Dianthus image into it. After I added a fun yellow stroke detail to the letters, I added the bright and sunny yellow background. I saved as I went along, nothing like losing all your work because the program quit, which has happened before, maddening is putting it mildly. After I saved it as an InDesign file, I exported it as a JPEG file. I closed out of InDesign and then opened up Photoshop! I wish I had CS5 or CS5.5, but I am still very happy with what I can do using CS4.      

Filter order: Paint Daub, Posterized

   

     Photoshop filters are so much fun, I could spend hours playing with them and never getting off just one image, they are addictive! I started with the first
Dianthus image at the bottom of my post here. I
cropped it and then adjusted the red color intensity and it created this cool rainbow effect. I think I used the "paint daub" filter after that, which softened it all up, but might have been another filter, I forgot already, big surprise. I really liked the softened rainbow look a lot and will probably do something else with it later, maybe use it in a ATC.       

Red hue adjusted all the way to the right

     Once I had the softened painterly image, I decided it needed a bit more of an edge,

so I used the "posterize" filter. It added a black edge and made the flowers "pop" a bit more. You can see that it also darkened the image, which is more of what I wanted to use to fill in my lettering. If you click on the photo, you will see a larger image with more detail. After using the posterize filter, I decided to use one last filter to take a little bit of the edge off the posterizing results. I chose the "Cutout" filter, which simplifies the image. It did cause the loss of the rainbow effect that I liked so much, but I decided I was happier with the cutout filter effect and that is what I went with.

My original photograph

     My last steps were to save the image as a JPEG file and then

"Place" it into the InDesign file I had already started. I selected it and "cut" it from the place where I had placed it and then selected the lettering outlines and selected "Place into." I moved the image around and resized it a few times to get it right where I wanted it.
     Let me just say (not again!), creating art everyday is more time consuming than I thought it would be, I am not meeting my own personal quota of one piece everyday. But I feel wonderful every time I create something new, especially when I get a chance to use those programs I spent so much time learning over the last two years in school. It makes me happy. Really happy.
     So if you are itching to make something yourself, anything at all, I have just one thing to tell you..."do it!"