I woke up and looked out the window, it was still a bit dark and as I made coffee I glanced at the car parked in the driveway. It was getting a layer of white on it!
SNOW! Snow! Snow!
As it lightened I was entertained by the mares, Strider and Jewel who chased around and kicked up their heels.
Nikki and friends stood quietly in the snow on top of our 'bowl' above the house and above the Dexter Cows paddock.
The Dexters didn't mind the snow at all. Seemed quite at home in it as long as they got their feed!
As I was doing the chores I could hear the wonderful sound of laughter from the neighbor's house near the top of the hill. The kids must have gone out to enjoy the first snowfall. I heard squeals of laughter that made me stop and just listen. Yes, it was a 'Gloomy Gus' day, but I did enjoy it however. As I will probably enjoy it when we get a real heavy snow fall that I can use snow shoes with!
She thinks I work for cookies. She thinks I should be a model. She is a dork. I'm the con artist you see. I know she has cookies in her pocket and she wants me to sit nice and pretty on a rock so she can take my portrait.
She says 'sit' and waves a cookie around. I stand and stare at her, then lick my lips. If I frustrate her enough, she'll give me the cookie.
Then I act like I'm in trouble, I drop my ears and pretend I have no IDEA what 'sit' is.
Lick my lips once more to let her know, I KNOW those cookies are mine! She is still saying 'Sit Morris, SIT!'
So I go ahead and sit and stare at her feet. Not what she wanted. But I'm watching to see if she moves at all. I want the cookie at all costs! I get the cookie. I eat the cookie. Then I run and jump and go sniffing, doing what dogs do best. Yes I 'watered' some rocks and then of course did what SHE had wanted me to do all along... I did a most Noble Pose....
I got a second cookie for that. It was a 2 cookie outing. Pretty good don't you say? One of these days, I'll actually have her trained. But some humans are just so hard to work with!
I took a short walk to the creek today to get some early afternoon light on the rocks and the green moss, and hoped to bribe Morris into some posing for 'his' upcoming book. Getting him to pose isn't really very easy. He is so interested in everything that he can smell and being a Jack Russell, he is rarely still for a portrait. I brought along some dog cookies and pretty much just hoped for the best.
My best friend in this sort of situation is a digital camera that can take rapid fire photos. Here Morris does stay still long enough while I ask him if 'he'd like a cookie'. His response was immediate. I asked for a 'sit' and got a half-sit, but that was okay for my purposes.
I put the toy frog on a rock and then stepped back across the creek to pick up the camera only to find Morris back checking things out.
I had to act quick and hope that I would get something that I could use for the book. I got several shots in quickly before Morris decided that the toy was nothing he really wanted. In the woods he rarely touches any toy if I set it down. He will however go up and sniff at it, but he has yet to take it and play with it. We spent about a half hour wandering around and taking photos. Morris stuck very close to me. That may be due to the fact that we have spotted a silver wolf in our area, but I can't really tell. Today's shoot was a success, I did come away with some shots ... with editing, that will work nicely in the book!
With the 'demise' of one of the most favorited toys in our house, I had an idea strike me up alongside the head...literally. I'd been out of ideas for another book in the line of Morris's Children's Books.
But when I could not find an exact look alike for Happy the Hedgehog and one of my grandchildren had bought Morris a brand spanking new Hedgehog toy...remarking apparently that this new Hedgehog could be Happy's cousin...and....and... my grandaughter picked up a Frog Toy which quickly became Morris's second favorite toy...
It suddenly started coming together.
Morris wakes up one morning and finds out that Happy the Hedgehog is NOT in the toy-box. Crazy the Squirrel and Terrible Tiger decide to meet on 'the rock' to discuss where could Happy have gone? Morris was so sad, they had to do something.
They heard of a Wise old Creature in the Deep Deep Woods that was a Mysterious Old Frog that may be able to help them...
So another adventure begins. Will they find Happy? What will the Mysterious Old Frog tell them? What will they have to do? What awaits them?
Stay tuned!
I'm using Topaz and Photoshop Elements 5. In this 'book', I'll be trying to create composites of photos for the effects and illustrations I would like to have appear in the book. I will rely heavily on layers and going over tutorials by Topaz Labs for ideas.
The demise of Happy the Hedgehog gave me a new idea for this year. What if Morris missed Happy so much that he set out on an adventure looking for him? What if Morris and friends decide to go deep into the scary woods and search high and low, encountering all sorts of things? Well, that gave me just enough fuel for thought to get motivated to continue the storybooks for my grand-kids, the neighbor children, and my mom who enjoys them immensely. So I'll be scurrying around collecting photos and making composites and learning some new methods for making illustrations out of photos. The photo above is a composite with textures, Morris was added in after the fact. So look forward to updates in this adventure!
I was in the Halloween mood and I had a shot of the neighbor's cat I'd taken while doing a 'shoot' with the neighbor's children. So here is the starting photograph. Next I put it in Photoshop 7.0, yes, I have an ancient version, but it still works wonderfully!
I use my preset in Adjust that I call Spooky Adjust. Next I duplicate the layer and rename it Simplify and it looks like this:
I still want to do something with the fur to make it a bit more abstract looking so I use Clean, again one of my own presets that I've come up while doing animals. The difference is not much to most people, but to me, it gives a slightly more pleasing effect.
I duplicate this layer and use ReMask to pull just the head of the cat out.
It took quite a bit of experimentation. At one point I realized that I really wanted the eyes to stand out more and not be covered by the texture or the pumpkins. So I used the lasso tool to select the eyes from Layer 1, brightened them, and added them back into my 'clean my preset' layer.
This looked pretty cool and I was very tempted to just stop here. But I brought back in the other layers.
Here is what all the layers looked like before the finish. I added some cracks with Obsidian Dawn Brushes[free!] for a bit more texture. I erased out the Dry Times Texture in spots with a irregular brush with rough edges at about 35%. Final:
Here is a photo of Morris on the very first day with his Hedgehog that he inherited from another dog that passed away. The photo was taken on May 12, 2007. So yes, he isn't that terrible awful on his toys, but by the time we started doing the Happy Hedgehog and Crazy Squirrel Books, Happy had begun to look a bit time worn.
Soon people began buying Morris Hedgehogs and his Happy Hedgehog family grew and grew. Yet the one he most often pulled out of the toy box was still ol' Happy. Happy who was now missing most of his nose most of the fur on one side, and had several splits in his seams.
I'd sewed Happy up several times and now there was just about nothing left to attach thread too. No, Morris didn't rip it apart. He takes his toys by the tip of his teeth and shakes them, then tosses them. Eventually the fur pulls right out.
So sadly I had to wrap the original Happy Hedgehog up and toss it. We've put a special Hedgehog that he recently got from Dennis [our grandson] up so he can't play with it. I'm hoping to use this one as the new replacement in the next story book I do.
Morris didn't seem to upset, he spent about 10 minutes looking for Happy then resolved to go and play with the frog that Ariel had given him.
I think I miss that ol' toy more than Morris does! Long live Happy Hedgehog!
