On a rainy day in my neck of the woods, I found myself in my kitchen with my Mom. She decided she needed a day of rest and relaxation. She has been in Wisconsin for a bit over two weeks and has been going non stop. I was more than happy to hear from her that she was going to take it easy today.

Until...

I found out her taking it easy was to make toffee cookies, a blueberry coffee cake and a chicken casserole for dinner. While the weather was finally cooling off outside, my kitchen felt like a furnace. With the oven being on all afternoon my kitchen /Office area heated up to 110F. Okay, maybe not 110F but it was darn hot in here. Unfortunately, you really can not complain about the heat when good things were being made.

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To take my mind off of being in a sweltering sauna I decided to see if I could help out some friends of mine by making them a photo for a new show they are doing. I really loved how it came out so I thought I would share my relaxing evening with you in hopes that you will see how playing can result in cool things that you can say you made.

The first thing I did was go to my best friend Google. I typed in what I was looking for and then clicked on the tab called images. Once you are under images click on the tools tab. From there a pulldown menu will show up. Click on Labeled for reuse. By scrolling down the page you will see all the photos that are available to use legally.

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I found two photos I thought I could work with to achieve...I wasn't sure yet what I was going to be making but I had a start of something with the two photos I had found.

The hardest part of anything is the start. Blank white pages looking back at you can be disheartening, to say the least. What works well for me is to just start. Most times the end product will look nothing like the beginning. This is fine by me and another great reason to just play.

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When searching for the wolf I was just looking for a wolf figure I liked. The one I found was perfect in my head but I didn't like the background. Using the eraser tool I deleted it. There are many ways you can delete backgrounds or objects you don't like in a photo. In this case, it was just easier for me to erase it.

Next was making the eagle the correct size by using the scale tool. I like using the tool because then I can move the object around and see what size it really is. I don't know about you but to me, pixels is just a number. I am more of a visual person so using the tool option is always my choice.

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I now had two images I liked but I did not have a background for them to be on. Grabbing another photo of the eagle I plopped it down on a new layer and started to smudge the colors around. I used long strokes and different brushes that were about 40 pixels wide to shmear the colors around.

Not shown here is the part where I made a layer and filled it with just black to go under everything. When using the smearing tool on a clear background you will end up with bald spots. The solid black took care of filling those in.

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One of the reasons I had picked the photo of the eagle was for the texture found down by its claws. I thought it looked pretty cool and that it might come in handy while making the new photo. I was right about needing to use it in the end.

I pulled up the original photo of the eagle in one window and using the clone tool I marked what I wanted to copy to the new image I was making. I made the brush size of the clone tool about 40 pixels again and started to copy what I wanted on to a new layer.

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I added layers over the top of the eagle and wolf. I wanted to add more depth to the new artwork by cloning textures picked up also from the original eagle photo. Always remember and never forget layers are your friend.

A good tip: If you want to add two layers together, turn off what you don't want in the layers pallet. Do an export of what you want to combine.

Once combined you can add the exported image back in as a new layer and turn off the original layers until you need them again. This way you don't lose what you have if things don't turn out as you want them too.

There are many ways to go about doing anything when working in GIMP. I am just giving you one way of many on how I use GIMP.

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I really loved how the new artwork came out but it was missing something I just didn't know what yet. I didn't think the photo needed any more added to it so that just left the color of it to play with. Using the color curves palet I started to make the whole photo darker and new I had hit the mark. The white became whiter and the photo as a whole showed more depth.

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I was really happy with how it turned out!! The added plus was by the time I was done I was happy and tired from all I had accomplished that day.

I hope you have enjoyed a peek into how I come up with ideas and maybe learned a thing or two in the process. If you have any questions please feel free to ask. If I don't know I will try and find the answer.

I wish you all a day filled with many happy things!! Thank you for stopping to read my post.

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